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THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 


THE CERTAINTY 
OF GOD 


BY 

WILFRID J. MOULTON, 

M.A., B.D. (Cantab.) 

PRINCIPAL AND TUTOR IN SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY, D1DSBURY COLLEGE, MANCHESTER 
LECTURER IN THE HISTORY OP DOCTRINE AT THE VICTORIA UNIVERSITY 

OP MANCHESTER 


NEW 



YORK 


GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



PRtoo 

■A1 75 


SIFT 

PUBLISHER 

’? f 0 



THE CERTAINTY OF GOD. V 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 




CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 

I. Religion and Life 

- 

- 

PAGE 

I 

II. 

Our Faith in God 

- 

- 

- 9 

III. 

The Meaning of Jesus Christ 

- 

- 21 

IV. 

Jesus Christ and History 

- 

- 

- 33 

V. 

The Fact of Sin 

- 

- 

- 45 

VI. 

The Meaning of the Cross 

- 

mm 

- 57 

VII. 

The Fact of Conversion 

- 

- 

- 7 1 

VIII. 

The Social Consequences of 

Salvation 

- 85 

IX. 

Religion and Life, II - 

- 

tm 

- 99 


v 


THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 




The Certainty of God 


CHAPTER I 

RELIGION AND LIFE 

W HEN a recruit joins the British Army he 
is provided with a religion as part of 
his kit. It is supposed to be as natural 
for a young man to declare his religion as it is 
to tell the day of his birth. Every normal man 
is expected to have a religion of some kind. It 
may have little influence over his thought and 
less over his conduct, but in some form or other 
it is there, to be found when sought for, as much 
a part of human personality as the power of 
thinking or of loving. 

When we turn our eyes backwards and survey 
the history of humanity, we find that the assump¬ 
tion of the army is in broad agreement with the 
facts of life. From the Stone Age onwards in¬ 
numerable records show that men have always 
worshipped something. It is true that the story 
of the religions of the world is so confused and 
contradictory that it is not easy to define any 
common element amongst them. In the name 
and for the sake of religion men have reached the 


2 


THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

loftiest heights of devotion and sunk to the lowest 
depths of degradation. But to tell the story of 
man without finding in it a large place for reli¬ 
gion is like the play of Hamlet without the 
Prince of Denmark. Whatever we think of 
religion ourselves, whether we think of it as the 
result of a direct revelation of God to man, or 
whether we think of it as as much out of date 
as witchcraft, we must study its manifestations 
before we can understand either ourselves or our 
fellows. Bousset is surely right when he says : 
“ In spite of separation from other branches of 
human activity, religion has ever remained the 
central interest of this activity, and wherever the 
surging roar of life has been loudest, and wherever 
human life has been most profoundly moved in 
struggle and conflict, religion has been the 
cause.”* 

Now, from all this it follows that if religion is 
a universal fact there must be universal needs in 
human nature to which it appeals, and that in its 
perfected form it must satisfy human nature as a 
whole. If this be so, then the proper line of 
approach to any religion is the study of human 
nature. What am I ? What are my powers and 
my limitations ? What are my needs ? What 
is the purpose of my life ? If religion is worth 
anything it must give answers to such questions. 
And we, for our part, must work out the answers 
for ourselves before we can understand how far 
Teligion can satisfy us. 

* Bousset, What is Religion ? p. 5. 


RELIGION AND LIFE 3 

Human nature is a very complex thing. In 
the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table , Oliver Wen¬ 
dell Holmes expresses this in his own whimsical 
way by saying that whenever John and Thomas 
talk together at least six personalities are taking 
part in the dialogue. Thus, there are three 
Johns—the real John known only to his Maker ; 
John’s ideal John, never the real John and often 
very unlike him ; Thomas’s ideal John, never the 
real John, nor John’s John, but often very unlike 
either. And similarly there are three Thomases 
—the real Thomas ; Thomas’s ideal Thomas ; 
John’s ideal Thomas. “ Only one of the three 
Johns is taxed,” says Dr. Holmes, “ only one 
can be weighed on a platform balance ; but the 
other two are just as important in the conversa¬ 
tion.” 

Yet when John gets to work on himself he has 
to carry this analysis much farther. To begin 
with, he finds a dependent self. There is a self 
within every one of us which is conscious of its 
own littleness and helplessness. In the presence 
of the tremendous forces of Nature, face to face 
with the mysteries of pain and of death, this self 
reaches out for something beyond, some sure 
foundation of life on which to rest, and feels 
orphaned in this world till it has found some great 
Companion able to say : “ Everyman I will go 
with thee, to be thy Guide in thy most need.” 
If it cannot find this it falls back, as so many 
soldiers did in the war, on the thought of Fate. 
It must get rid of its burden somehow. It is 





4 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

too heavy to carry. It has been truly said that 
“ If we are to preserve our sanity in moments of 
utmost tension we must have some greater power 
on which we can throw the burden.” Religion 
calls this power, God. It teaches that only in 
the sense of dependence on a greater Being can 
we rise above our surroundings and become inde¬ 
pendent of the world. If this were all that we 
found in human nature we should have the clue 
right in our hands of the prevalence of religion 
and need seek no further. 

But it is quite manifest that this is not all we 
find. Side by side with this we find a second self 
which we may call the assertive self. This is a 
self which is impatient of the thought of weak¬ 
ness ; proud of its own powers and eager to 
express them. It finds its expression in art, in 
creative work, in fearless thinking, in the fullest 
and freest fellowship with others, and claims the 
right to share in every type of human experi¬ 
ence. To it the thoughts of the dependent self 
seem sometimes like morbid and unwholesome 
dreams, and it replies : 

This world’s no blot for us, 

Nor blank ; it means intensely, and means good : 

To find its meaning is my meat and drink. 

If religion is to satisfy this self it must be not 
a crutch nor a shelter, but a fuller means of 
expression. It must mean not surrender but life. 

But we must go farther still and add still a 
third which we may call the moral self . This 


RELIGION AND LIFE 5 

self hears the call to a higher and purer life than 
it has known and is haunted by the sense of 
moral unworthiness. It is conscious of a struggle 
between nobler and baser elements. It cannot 
rest content with the teaching that it is enough 
for a man to let every side of his nature express 
itself to the full. There is a judgment of value 
from which it cannot escape, which tells it that 
the world-old distinction between right and wrong 
is inevitably true. For all its struggles it knows 
that it is fighting a losing battle, and it cries out 
urgently for some new source of power and inward 
purification. We do not need to go far afield to 
find illustrations of this. The world’s literature 
of conscience is full of them. We read Paul’s 
tragic story of his own inward strife. “ I cannot 
understand my own actions,” he says, “ I do not 
act as I want to act; on the contrary, I do what 
I detest. . . . The good that I want to do I do 
not perform. The evil that I want not to do 
that I keep on doing. ... 0 wretched man that 
I am! Who shall deliver me?” There is no 
man w r ho is honest with himself who has not had 
times when he has echoed that cry. Whatever 
else religion does it must meet this need or it 
wiH be vain. 

But even yet we are not at the end. Just 
when conscience is most insistent there comes 
another voice, which we may call the voice 
of the social self. This declares that such 
scruples come because a man gets morbidly 
obsessed by his own personal needs until he is 


6 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

sick with self-consciousness. Out in the open 
there is sunshine and health, in the eager life of 
men, in the life of commerce or politics or social 
service. Leave your fancies and self-tormenting 
anxieties, it says, and press out into the life of 
others. Or as R. L. Stevenson puts it : 

O to be up and doing, O 
Unfearing and unshamed to go 
In all the uproar and the press 
About my human business ! 

My undissuaded heart 1 hear 
Whisper courage in my ear. 

With voiceless calls, the ancient earth 
Summons me to a daily birth. 

Thou, O my love, ye, O my friends— 

The gist of life, the end of ends— 

To laugh, to love, to live, to die, 

Ye call me by the ear and eye ! 

Religion can only satisfy this self by showing 
that it is perfected not in isolation, but in being 
led out into a larger fellowship, where room is 
found for all the kindly humanities of ordinary 
life. 

We can hardly doubt the truth of this analysis. 
Different aspects are prominent at different times 
and in different moods. Differences in tempera¬ 
ment make one man primarily an artist and 
another a thinker and another a man of action, 
but yet in every normal being these selves are to 
be found. 

Now when we ponder the different types of 
religion it seems plain that they have appealed 


RELIGION AND LIFE 7 

very often to one self only. Thus some forms of 
teaching have so emphasized the sense of depend¬ 
ence that human individuality has been crushed 
and the force and virility taken out of it. Man 
must lose himself in God and refuse steadfastly 
to assert himself at all. Other forms, like some 
of the wilder religions of the East, both in ancient 
and modern days, have so emphasized the right 
of self-expression that they have grown into 
uncontrolled excesses and given the name of 
religion to passionate self-indulgence. Others, 
again, have been so conscious of moral evil that 
they have tried to conquer evil by eliminating 
desire, and taught an asceticism which denies all 
that is pleasant and beautiful in life. And others, 
again, manifest enough at the present time, have 
made the service of humanity the whole of 
religion. Such views try to do justice to the 
reality of duty, and to the wealth of human love 
and social progress, but find nothing higher in the 
universe than the intellectual and moral activity 
of man, perfected in disinterestedness and self- 
sacrifice. Really they are only called religious 
by courtesy, or from the want of a better word 
to denote the devotion which they inspire. 

It is our claim that Christianity is the highest 
and final form of religion because it combines 
into one harmonious whole all these imperfect 
teachings. It recognizes the need of some sure 
foundation of life and finds it in our Father God, 
who does not desire that man should lose his 
individuality, but that he should perfect it in the 


8 


THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

life of sonship. It does not deny the right of our 
various powers to express themselves. On the 
contrary it teaches that man is made in the 
image of God, who pronounced His creation good 
and is best served by the fullest life. It does not 
minimize the greatness of the task of morality, 
but it teaches that our human desires are not to 
be crushed out of being, but rather used and 
directed towards the highest aims. When man 
finds this task too hard for him it brings to him 
moral reinforcement and renewing power. And, 
finally, when man considers the uplifting of human¬ 
ity as a whole it bids him think of this as a task 
which he is sharing with God Himself, God who 
has shared our human life and is still bearing 
our burdens and leading us on towards a golden 
future. 

It claims that when all possible allowance has 
been made for what we have gained from our 
education, from the society in which we live and 
from our inherited beliefs, we are brought, in the 
last resort, face to face with a living God, and 
that throughout our lives we may receive : 

Authentic tidings of invisible things. 

In the chapters that follow we set forth some of 
the reasons for holding this faith. 


CHAPTER II 


OUR FAITH IN GOD 

T HE part played by religion in human life 
is illustrated by the uses of the word and 
its derivatives in common speech. When 
Antony Wood writes : “ An old word is retain’d 
by an Antiquary with as much Religion as a 
Relick”—he thinks of religion as a binding power, 
to be obeyed with scrupulous care and exactness. 
“ He is a coward,” says Fabian in Twelfth Night , 
“ a most devout coward, religious in it ” Poor 
Viola, in her brave man’s attire, is bound to be 
a coward and is under obligation not to fight. 
When we hear someone say : “ My religion is 
to do to others what I want them to do to me,” 
we know that he means to tell us of the highest 
form of duty he acknowledges. Common to all 
such sayings is the thought that religion stands 
for the highest obligation known to man. 

Yet such uses of the word, natural as they are, 
can easily be seen to take away that part of the 
meaning which is of most value to us. The chief 
characteristic of religion, in all its great historic 
forms, is the faith that there are higher powers 
than merely human ones, and that we may have 


10 


THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

real personal intercourse with them. Religion, 
in any real sense of the word, involves prayer, and 
prayer without someone to pray to seems an 
empty superstition. There may be those who 
find in prayer just a contemplation of the highest 
ideals of life, and a submission to their influence. 
But to most of us the question whether these 
ideals are grounded in a living God is imperative. 
Hence we are driven on to ask what we mean by 
God and whence our faith in Him is derived. 

The answer to the question as to the source of 
our belief in God is not easy. To most, if not all, 
of the readers of this book, such a belief has been 
familiar from earliest childhood. We receive it 
from our homes, from the whole of our social 
environment, from the books we read, from the 
language we use. It was part of our life long 
before we thought of questioning its claims upon 
us. 

When we come to the age at which we refuse 
to accept everything on the authority of others 
and seek reasons for ourselves, we find the belief 
full of perplexities. There is the familiar con¬ 
trast between the teaching of the goodness of 
God and the mercilessness of the world we live in. 
There is the world-old question of the sufferings 
of the righteous. There is the rebellion of youth 
against restraint. There is the apparent failure 
of religious teaching to produce the results at 
which it aims. Most people who think at all 
have to confront these difficulties. Indeed, it is 
probably true to say that few people really be- 


II 


OUR FAITH IN GOD 

lieve in God until they have found out how hard 
it is to believe in Him at ail. Is there any sure 
guide to faith ? 

To begin with, we have the old intellectual 
arguments. The more we learn the more w r e 
find that we are living in a world shot through 
and through by reason. It is not our reason, 
since, as the newer psychology and philosophy 
have been teaching us, reason in man, whether in 
the individual or the race, is quite a late arrival. 
This human parvenu seems a poor relation of a 
power everywhere at work. To suppose that 
men are the only thinkers in the universe seems 
preposterous. Hence we are driven back to¬ 
wards faith in a supreme Mind. 

Moreover we find it hard to escape from the 
thought of a great purpose permeating the whole. 
There is a fine illustration used by Prof. Pringle- 
Pattison. He writes : “ When we read or wit¬ 
ness a play for the first time, and the course of 
the action is unknown to us, this sense of the 
solidarity of the whole, the prescience of an imma¬ 
nent destiny working itself out in individual 
scenes—in a word or a glance—naturally grows 
as we proceed, and reaches its maximum of 
intensity as we approach the close.”* There 
we know that the mind of the master is being 
unfolded in his work. So the spectacle of this 
marvellous universe, with its pathos and its 
tragedy, its joys and sorrows, its triumphs and 
defeats, is not unlike this, and sends us back to 

♦ The Idea of God, p. 361. 


12 


THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

search for the Author of the wondrous whole. Of 
course, we may believe that the Author does not 
mean us ever to understand, any more than 
Browning was content to be revealed in his 
writings : 

Which of you did I enable 
Once to slip inside my breast, 

There to catalogue and label 
What I like least, what love best ? 

We may follow Mr. Wells and speak of “ the dark 
Power” at the heart of everything. But if 
there is no personal Power at all, then reason is 
vain and thinking a mockery. 

But further still, we have to reckon with the 
claims of the moral consciousness. Much work 
has been done here of recent years. We have 
been taught the natural history of morality. We 
have been shown the slow stages by which our 
highest moral ideals have grown up out of primi¬ 
tive taboos and the like. It is often suggested 
that the old argument from conscinece to God has 
been done away with for ever. But deeper 
reflection does not confirm this view. There is 
to be sure a natural history of science. We may 
see how from obscure beginnings, with magical 
views of natural forces, through innumerable 
errors and failures, the great discoveries of modern 
science have been prepared for. But the modern 
man does not doubt the conclusions of his teachers 
because some prehistoric Newton or Einstein 
blundered in his theories. Truths once dis¬ 
covered shine by their own light and give real 


OUR FAITH IN GOD 13 

knowledge about a real world. It is the same 
with the truths of morality. However they came 
to us they are now inevitable. They likewise 
give us real knowledge about a real world, and 
tell us that the moral ideal is no less real than the 
world itself. Hence they drive us back to seek 
for One in whom the moral law lives, and from 
whom it comes to us. 

Reason, Purpose, Morality, all three point back 
to God. Is it not true of Beauty also ? When 
Francis Thompson says of Francis of Assisi, that 
“ he discerned through the lamp Beauty the 
Light God/’ does he not utter the mind of every 
true artist that “ the light that never was on sea 
or land ” comes from the Father of Lights, the 
primeval Beauty ? Beauty is as real as energy, 
as sure as duty. Must we not say that it also is 
not homeless in the universe or merely fugitive ? 
It has its home in God. 

Yet these familiar arguments, though they 
may forbid the attitude of final scepticism, leave 
us unsatisfied. They throw doubts on the con¬ 
clusions of unbelief, but they do not go far 
enough to doubt our doubts away. Is there no 
surer voice to which we can listen, able to give 
us real unquestioned knowledge ? 

As soon as we ask this question Christianity 
points us to the teaching of Jesus, and declares 
that in Him we have given to us the full revela¬ 
tion of God. Let us, then, at this stage inquire 
what it is that He teaches about God. 

In the first place, one cannot miss our Lord’s 


i 4 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

absolute certainty of God. As we ponder the 
arguments which have just been outlined we 
recall the words of Wordsworth : 

The intellectual power through words and things 

Went sounding on a dim and perilous way. 

But to Jesus there was nothing dim or perilous 
in His thought of God. God to Him was a fact 
of immediate experience and it was wonderful to 
Him that men believed in God so little and that 
the faith they professed made so little difference 
in their lives. The question—“ How is it that 
ye have no faith ? ”—is often on His lips. Surely, 
the pure in-heart can see God. It is because 
men’s eyes are half-blinded by evil that they miss 
the open vision. 

’Tis ye, ’tis your estranged faces, 

That miss the many-splendoured thing. 

There are two words in particular that describe 
His teaching about God, Reverence and Homeli¬ 
ness. 

The sense of the greatness and infinite power 
of God rests on all that Jesus says of Him. To 
Jesus, God was Lord of heaven and earth, the 
One supreme King and Ruler of all things, before 
whom all secrets were open. To Jesus it was 
almost incredible that men should use the name 
of God so lightly, should take it on their lips to 
support their trivial oaths, or use it carelessly as 
a pretext to excuse neglected duty. 

Yet at the same time, God clothed the flowers, 
marked the fall of the sparrow, numbered the 


OUR FAITH IN GOD 15 

hairs of the head. The homeliest images are 
used to describe God’s relationships to men : the 
woman sweeping her house to find the lost coin, 
the shepherd setting out to find the one lost 
sheep, the father waiting to welcome back his 
wandering son. It may be said that Jesus takes 
what are perhaps the two greatest words of human 
life—home and God—and joins them together 
with perfect naturalness, making the one illus¬ 
trate the other. At the heart of His teaching lies 
the thought that man away from God is homesick 
for Him, as the prodigal in the far country was 
homesick. To find God is as natural to man as it 
was for the lost son to meet his father’s welcome. 
So soon as a man learns this he is at home in the 
world. Sunshine and shower are his Father’s 
gifts to him ; prayer is talking with the Father ; 
life is a cheerful fulfilling of the daily task in the 
light of the Father’s face, and the sharing of His 
kindnesses with all the other members of His 
great human family. 

It may be said that one of the chief needs of 
those who call themselves Christians is to work 
out what is involved in this teaching. We have 
said, for instance, that to Jesus, God was King. 
But what did Jesus mean by a king ? Are we to 
think of an Eastern despot, ruling with absolute 
sway, claiming and delighting in titles of honour ? 
Shall we say with Milton : 

His state 

Is kingly; thousands at His bidding speed, 

And post o’er land and ocean without rest ? 


16 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

If we do this we neglect our Lord’s own exposition 
of what true kingship means. To Him royalty 
means service, kingliness means work for others, 
“ even as the Son of Man came not to be minis¬ 
tered unto but to minister, and to give His life a 
ransom for many.” So God Himself reveals His 
Kingship by doing most and bearing all. The 
reverence that we pay to Him is not servile fear, 
but the moral reverence that cannot be withheld 
from One who is so immeasurably better than 
ourselves. 

Similarly we say that the whole conception of 
authority is transformed by this view of God. 
Youth, in every generation, has been in revolt 
against an authority imposed from without, to 
be accepted without question. If this revolt is 
more manifest now than ever, it is because we 
are living in a time of great changes, when long 
established conventions have been challenged 
and old forms have been broken up. But always 
it has been true that the demand for unquestion¬ 
ing obedience has roused resentment. The 
familiar words : 

Theirs not to make reply, 

Theirs not to reason why, 

Theirs but to do and die : 

are true of soldiers just because, for the time 
being, they have surrendered their individuality 
and have lost themselves in the army. But the 
life of a soldier, even though we grant that it may 
sometimes be a regrettable necessity, is very far 


OUR FAITH IN GOD 17 

from the ideal life for a man. A man must reason 
why, and can only obey with his whole heart 
what he knows to be true and good. So the 
demand for religious obedience must command 
the allegiance of both heart and mind if it is to be 
accepted. But this is just what the thought of 
God which Jesus presents does for us. Those 
who can receive that teaching are not impelled 
by the fear of consequences or by the dread of 
an external penalty. What they fear most is 
estrangement from such a God. What they 
desire most is to have fellowship with Him, since 
they know that till they have found this fellow¬ 
ship they do not know what real life is. All 
thoughts of God from nature, from reason, from 
morality, from beauty, point onwards to some 
foundation of all our being. We must be loyal 
to such thoughts and follow them as far as they 
can lead. But the God and Father of our Lord 
Jesus Christ, if He really exists, is worthy of our 
passionate devotion. We obey Him because we 
can do no other. 

It is worth while pointing out how completely 
the teaching of Jesus rules out some superstitions 
that still find a place in our language, whatever 
we make of them in reflective thought. We 
have always heard the saying : “ It’s a judgment 
on him.” The writer was told quite seriously, 
only a year or two ago, of a wind that, for the 
first time on record, blew down a chimney and 
covered everything with soot because a woman 
had begun her spring-cleaning on Good Friday. 


18 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

We remember the old cautionary tales of people 
who met terrible misfortunes because they did not 
keep Sunday properly or in some other way 
transgressed the code of their community. To 
such ways of thinking God is like a great police¬ 
man or schoolmaster, waiting His time to strike, 
keeping order by sharp penalties. All this was 
ruled out by our Lord. Those on whom the 
tower of Siloam fell, or had been slain by Pilate’s 
guard, were not singled out for punishment by 
God. The old view that still survives in the legal 
phrase, “ an act of God,” which means, apparently, 
an act for which no rational explanation can be 
given, is utterly foreign to our Lord’s teaching. 
In His thought of God there is nothing vindictive. 
Tireless patience, unwearied magnanimity, never 
failing goodness, are the marks of the God in 
whom He believed, and with whom He held 
converse. This is to Him the open secret of the 
universe, disclosed to the simple and the child¬ 
like. To know it is to enter into the kingdom of 
heaven, and brings rest and peace and joy. 

Is this teaching true, or are we falling back into 
the old fallacy of personifying our own ideals ? 
Have we grown beyond the criticism of Xeno¬ 
phanes ?—“ If oxen and lions had hands, and 
could paint with their hands and produce works 
of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of 
the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen . . . 
So the Ethiopians make their gods black and 
snub-nosed ; the Thracians give theirs red hair 
and blue eyes.” Once, when rnen thought the 


OUR FAITH IN GOD 19 

victorious soldier the highest of all human types, 
God was a Man of War. So to the philosopher 
who thought the unexamined life was not worth 
living, God was the supreme Thinker. Now, 
after bitter experience has taught us the futility of 
force and the majesty of moral goodness, we 
picture a God full of graciousness and compassion, 
inexorably good but immeasurably kind. But 
after all, have we any sure ground for believing 
that such a God really is ? The rest of this book 
is taken up with the answer to that question, 
since the answer cannot be given in a sentence or 
two, but must rise out of our whole view of human 
life and history. Let us close this chapter by con¬ 
sidering the answer of the New Testament writers. 

They were sure of God, first because they found 
Him in the history of the past. We shall con¬ 
sider this in Chapter IV. But they were made 
certain of this by Jesus Himself. “ We believe 
in God through Christ,” says Peter. We turn to 
John’s first Epistle and ask him, “ Why do you 
believe in God ? ” The answer is, “ We have 
seen Jesus, have heard His voice, have handled 
Him with our hands, and we know.” We find 
the same thought expressed in our own times by 
Herrmann and may quote some of his glowing 
words. “ God makes Himself known to us, so 
that we may recognize Him, through a fact , on 
the strength of which we are able to believe on Him. 

. . . We Christians hold that we know only one 
fact in the whole world which can overcome every 
doubt of the reality of God, namely, the appear- 


20 


THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

ance of Jesus in history, the story of which has 
been preserved for us in the New Testament. 
Our certainty of God may be kindled by many 
other experiences, but has ultimately its firmest 
basis in the fact that within the realm of history 
to which we ourselves belong, we encounter the 
man Jesus as an undoubted reality.”* 

Some who read these pages may know for 
themselves the truth of these words. Baffled and 
perplexed by the problems of life and thought, 
they have turned back to the Gospels. As they 
have read there has risen before their eyes the 
figure of the Son of Man, gracious, serene, confi¬ 
dent. They have heard His message of the Father 
and it has stirred the depths of their hearts. 
They have become conscious that they are in 
the presence of God, so that, whilst their doubts 
have not been solved, they have risen beyond 
them. The One of whom it is recorded that He 
said, “ No one cometh unto the Father but by 
me,” has led them to the Father. They have 
found God and God has found them. Who is 
this who leads men to God ? What are we to say 
of Jesus ? It is to this question that we must ncnv 
turn. 


• The Communion oj the Christian with God, E.T., p. 59. 


1 



CHAPTER III 

THE MEANING OF JESUS CHRIST 

G REAT men are both the products of their 
age and the creators of the future. The 
great man, says Eucken, “ is he who first 
clearly distinguishes the spiritual from the merely 
human, the eternal from the temporal, who first 
gives to life an independent worth, a value of its 
own, who first attains to the conception of univer¬ 
sal and imperishable truth/ 7 * If in literature 
or in art the test of greatness is the creation of a 
masterpiece, in life as a whole the supreme test of 
greatness is the creation of a new way of life. 
Judged by such a test, Jesus stands above and 
beyond all other teachers who have swayed the 
life of mankind. 

Yet it is plain that such a statement falls im¬ 
measurably below what the followers of Jesus in 
all ages have affirmed of Him. They have main¬ 
tained that in Him we see actually God manifest 
in the flesh. In Him God has visited mankind 
and dwelt amongst them. Hence the name of 
Jesus is above every name, not only because of 
His genius for religion or the nobility of His life 

• Problem of Human Ltje, xxi. 


21 


22 


THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

or the finality of His teaching, but because He is 
now, in the fullest sense of the word, divine, and 
receives as His due the worship of His people. 

This is, indeed, a tremendous claim to make. 
When first we understand what it means it 
staggers us and seems to confound all our think¬ 
ing. It has been said by an Indian missionary : 
“ To the Hindu it seems impossible to find a sure 
foundation for the eternal truths of religion in the 
accidents or incidents of time.”... 4 ‘ Is it possible” 
he asks, 44 that our faith in God should be made 
to depend upon the veracity of an historical fact 
occurring many centuries ago ? ”* 

Western thought gives abundant illustrations 
of the same perplexity. We find it dealt with, 
in Origen’s reply to Celsus, and it is still probably 
the main difficulty in the intellectual presenta¬ 
tion of the Christian faith. Really to believe : 

That the Eternal and Divine 
Did, nineteen centuries ago, 

In very truth . . . Enough ! you know 
The all-stupendous tale—that Birth, 

That Life, that Death!— 

perhaps no man truly believes this till he has 
found out how hard it is to believe it at all. 

When we ask ourselves why we believe this it 
is not easy to give an exact answer. To most of 
us it was part of the teaching of our childhood, 
confirmed by all the earliest influences of home 
and Church. As life went on and we met the 

* The Missionary Message, p. 167. Edinburgh Conference 
Reports, vol. iv. 


THE MEANING OF JESUS CHRIST 23 

conflicts of questioning and doubt, there were days 
when it seemed unreal and impossible. Yet still 
it forced itself upon us, till now in maturer life we 
repeat the confession of Thomas—“ My Lord and 
my God.” We are sure that Jesus is alive, that 
we are in daily fellowship with the living Christ, 
and that He has done for us and does still what 
no one but God can do. 

When we try to justify such a faith we 
begin by turning back to the records of the 
wonderful life. Biblical criticism has scru¬ 
tinized the records with the most minute at¬ 
tention and has had much to tell us about the 
mode of their composition. But the life itself 
only shines out more and more clearly. And 
what a life it is! We are brought face to face 
with One who stands apart from all the rest of us 
because He has no consciousness of sin. His 
words search our hearts ; He brings us to our 
knees, confessing that we are sinful men ; He so 
deepens the sense of duty that all our compla¬ 
cency is swept away, and yet with calm and un¬ 
faltering step He walked through life with His 
conscience unstained. Side by side with this we 
find that His life is not only pure and harmless, 
but rich in all the virile qualities that make up 
ideal manhood. We see this in the unconscious 
tribute of His disciples to Him. On Him and 
His sufficiency they rely with confidence, in His 
company they are safe. We see it in His ability 
to stand alone ; in His unflinching pursuit of His 
mission even when the cross was foreseen; in His 


24 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

reserve and self-restraint, His patience and long- 
suffering towards dull, unresponsive, self-opinion¬ 
ated people. We see it also in His power of 
righteous anger and fierce indignation against 
insincerity and unkindness. We see it further in 
the impression concerning His character which 
prevailed in the early Church. “ Be strong in the 
Lord, and in the strength of His might,” was not 
written of One who was only “ Gentle Jesus, 
meek and mild.” Bushnell wrote long ago that 
“ to be a perfectly harmless, guileless man, never 
doing ill even for a moment, we consider the same 
as to be a man destitute of spirit and manly 
force.” We recognize that view, which con¬ 
founds goodness with feebleness, gentleness 
with weakness, which calls brutality strength, 
and obstinacy firmness. But to look steadfastly 
at the character of Jesus purges the eyes and 
reveals the true moral values. 

From the character we pass on to ask what 
Jesus thought of Himself. Here again we stand 
amazed. On the one hand we find that He lived 
in absolute dependence on God, and was meek 
and lowly in heart. But on the other hand we 
find that He claimed to be the central Person in 
human history. There is no need here to draw 
out the evidence for this in detail. We remember 
how all the prophets of the past were servants— 
He was the Son. John the Baptist was a tremen¬ 
dous figure, greatest of all teachers of righteous¬ 
ness, yet the humblest follower of Jesus in know¬ 
ing Him was greater than John. Prophets and 


THE MEANING OF JESUS CHRIST 25 

righteous men had longed for the day of God’s 
fuller revelation, and desired in vain. But the 
disciples of Jesus had received what so many 
others had sought and failed to find. Who is 
this One towards whom all the history of the 
past had tended and in whom it was fulfilled ? 

For the answer we turn to other recorded say¬ 
ings of Jesus. In the great passage at the end of 
Matthew xxv. the Son of Man comes in His glory 
and takes His seat upon the throne of judgment. 
Much unprofitable discussion has taken place on 
such minor points as the exact meaning of the 
word “ eternal ” and the like. But the heart of 
the teaching is that this Son of Man holds a 
personal relation to every member of the human 
race. He is with the prisoner in his cell, the 
sufferer in his sickness, the hungry in his need. 
In dealing with their fellows, even the weakest 
and the poorest, men have to deal with Him, and 
by their attitude to Him their destiny is decided. 

Or we turn to another much discussed passage 
where He affirms : “ Of that day or that hour 
knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, 
neither the Son, but the Father.” There have 
been those who have tried to evade the plain 
meaning of these words, in the interests of a sup¬ 
posed orthodoxy, and there have been others who 
may have stressed unduly the ignorance which is 
here confessed. But the wonder lies deeper. 
The Man who speaks takes with perfect simpli¬ 
city, as His right, a place beyond all men and 
beyond all angels, nearer to God than them all. 


26 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

Or we take those unfathomable words, belonging 
to the earliest layer of the Gospel tradition, 
where He declares : “ No one knoweth the Son, 
save the Father ; neither doth any know the 
Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the 
Son willeth to reveal Him.” “ Here we are 
brought face to face with a relationship of abso¬ 
lute intimacy and perfect mutual correspondence, 
which, by its nature, cannot be transferred.” 
So Dr. Mackintosh writes, and continues, in words 
that we can only repeat with gratitude : “ Not 
merely is the Father’s being, to its inmost secret, 
open to the soul of Jesus, without that sense of 
mystery and inscrutable remoteness of which the 
greatest prophets had been conscious ; not 
merely is the Son’s knowledge of the Father 
complete, final and inaccessible to every other 
save those to whom the Son is mediator : along 
with this goes the fact that Jesus’ inmost being is 
known to the Father, and to none else. 4 Be¬ 
tween Jesus and God, one may say, all is com¬ 
mon.’ ”* Such words help us to understand Paul 
when he tells us how our Lord, being originally 
in the form of God, emptied Himself to become 
man. They point to a consciousness of God 
which had its roots in eternity. The difference 
between Jesus and ourselves lies here. He 
stooped to come to us. We must climb to get to 
Him. 

With this in our mind we understand His 
method with His disciples. He appealed to their 

*The Person oj Jesus Christ, pp. 27-8. 


THE MEANING OF JESUS CHRIST 27 

judgment by declaring truths about God and 
themselves to which the deepest chords of their 
nature responded. His parables constantly threw 
them back to work out the meaning of the analo¬ 
gies He drew between the divine and the human. 
He made them conscious of a whole world of 
spiritual strength and joy that lies all round about 
us. He made them feel that that world was as 
real to Him as the world of sight and touch 
and hearing, that its powers were open to Him 
and its secrets known by Him. But all the time 
He was leading them up to the question what He 
was in Himself. Hence came His joy over Peter’s 
confession. When Peter had declared that he 
saw in Jesus “ the Christ, the Son of the living 
God,” our Lord said that the first stone of the new 
building was laid, the building together into one 
habitation for God of all those who unite in the 
confession of His Lordship, and then set out to 
make His rule upon earth a reality. The more 
we dwell on these words, the more we see the 
majesty of the claim they involve. Our Lord knew 
what His work on earth was to be. He was to found 
a great community through which the world was 
to be brought back to God. The first decisive 
step was taken when He had brought one man to 
believe, not in His teaching nor in His programme, 
but on Himself. After that He was able for the 
first time to declare in plain words at what cost to 
Himself this purpose was to be realized, as He 
went on to speak of His passion and death. 

It is not, of course, to be supposed that Peter 


28 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

in his confession of Christ as the Son of God had 
any understanding of later Trinitarian doctrine. 
He knew that God had spoken to him in Jesus 
and that Jesus was the supreme messenger of 
God to mankind. Later, when convinced that 
his Lord was risen from the dead and was reigning 
in glory, his thoughts and those of his fellows 
rose higher. We can trace the process in the New 
Testament whereby the first believers were led 
to ascribe full divinity to the exalted Christ and 
worship Him side by side with God. As their 
thought interpreted their experience, they could 
find no halting-place short of this. If some of 
their words sound strange to us it may be because 
we know too little of their experience. When 
Sundar Singh describes a vision of the exalted 
Christ he says : “ I felt when first I saw Him as 
if there were some old and forgotten connection 
between us, as though He had said, but not in 
words, ‘ I am He, through whom you were 
created.’ I felt something the same, only far 
more intensely, as I felt when I met my father 
again after an interval of many years. My old 
love came back to me ; I knew I had been his 
before.”* 

It is easy to say that in such words we may 
have no more than echoes of Paul, but it is not 
adequate. What we have to explain is the like¬ 
ness of the experience which the words strive to 
express. We must reckon with the fact that in 
every century and every race there have been 

* The Sadhu, p. 54. 


THE MEANING OF JESUS CHRIST 29 

those who have found in Christ all that their 
hearts craved for. If it be said that after all 
“ Christ” to such men is only a symbol for the 
highest good they can conceive, we have to 
account for the fact that the very claims made for 
Himself by the Jesus of history have been fulfilled 
in the experience of His followers. The Sadhu 
writes, out of an almost unparalleled experience 
of suffering: “ Amidst persecution I have found 
peace, joy and happiness. ... In home He 
was there. In prison He was there. In Him the 
prison was transformed into Heaven, and the 
cross into a source of blessing.”* It is the same 
gracious Person who is with him who spoke long 
ago of His own presence with the captive and the 
persecuted. When we consider how an Eastern 
Man has become the ideal of the West, a Jew of 
the Russian, we see in Him a personality that at 
once transcends and yet includes that of every 
individual man. We, by slow and painful effort, 
with multiplied mistakes which only a great love 
can cover, enter into the minds of men of races 
alien to our own. With Him every man who 
comes to know Him for himself is at home at 
once, and has the consciousness of being perfectly 
understood. In this also we may see the 
authentic mark of true divinity. There is in 
each one of us a central citadel into which we 
cannot admit even our nearest and dearest. It 
is our inmost heart which Francis Thompson 
calls : 


* Ibid., p. 52. 


3 ° 


THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

The hold that falls not when the town is got, 

The heart’s heart, whose immured plot 
Hath keys yourself keep not! 

Yet into that secret fortress He enters. The 
writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews says of God: 
“ There is no creature that is not manifest in 
His sight : but all things are naked and laid open 
before the eyes of Him with whom we have to 
do.” Christian experience says the same of its 
Lord. We can believe that, as the same Epistle 
says, He entered into the holiest place of all, 
because He is able to penetrate into the darkest 
place of all, the secret recesses of our human 
nature. And when faith applies to Christ the 
words : 

Who made the heart—’tis He alone 
Decidedly can try us; 

He knows each chord—its various tone, 
Each spring—its various bias :— 

it is a judgment of experience which justifies 
itself. 

It is not now our purpose to follow the various 
forms in which Christian theology has sought 
to express this fundamental faith. Creeds and 
Councils are a little out of fashion. Yet we go 
far wrong when we allow ourselves or others to 
speak of the makers of the Creeds as mere word- 
spinners, delighting in subtle distinctions. When 
Athanasius, for example, declared “ Our all is at 
stake,” he was not contending for a formal ortho¬ 
doxy, but for a living Christ. Arius, with all his 


THE MEANING OF JESUS CHRIST 31 

contempt for theologians, and his plea for the 
plain man, in which he makes Alexandria of the 
fourth century so strangely modern, was really 
abandoning the central faith by which the Church 
had always lived. We may urge that at Nicaea 
or Chalcedon the theologians were cumbered with 
an inadequate conception of God, owing more to 
Plato and his successors than to the Gospels. We 
may agree that we can never hope to understand 
either God or man by wearisome talk of substance, 
or essence, or nature. We may think that modern 
psychology has given us better tools. But behind 
all this there lay at the root of the thought 
of the noblest of the leaders the deep conviction : 
“ I know that the One who has saved me is Lord 
of heaven and earth.” If another view of the 
meaning of Jesus is to be the faith of the future, 
we must at least recognize that it is new and that 
it was not with such a faith that the victories of 
the past were achieved. 







CHAPTER IV 


JESUS CHRIST AND HISTORY 

T HE acceptance of the full Christian doctrine 
of the Person of Christ has many conse¬ 
quences. In the first place, it brings with it a 
new conception of God. The attempt to express 
this in the doctrine of the Trinity was one of the 
first results. If it was only partially successful 
the reason is plain. Not only does it lead thought 
into mysteries of which no full understanding is 
possible, but it started, as has been said, rather 
from the Greek conception of God than from the 
teaching of Jesus. Yet it is clear that if Jesus 
was what faith proclaims Him His teaching must 
be the real foundation. 

In the second place, the doctrine of the Person 
of Christ brought a new conception of history. 
As Pfleiderer said : “ The appearance of a 

heavenly being for an episodic stay upon our 
earth breaks the connection of events in space 
and time upon which all our experience rests, and 
therefore it undoes the conception of history from 
the bottom.” There is much in such words that 
may be questioned. The word “ episodic ” is 

33 


34 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

not adequate. Faith claims that the life of Jesus 
was not so much an episode as a culmination. 
Further it may be said that “ experience ” must 
have a wider connotation given to it when the 
experience of the saints is included. Yet 
Pfleiderer’s words utter a challenge that must 
be met. The Christian conception of history 
is, indeed, different from that of the scientific 
historian. He is disposed to tell us that Christian¬ 
ity arose in an age when the philosophy of history 
was unknown, and that it can no longer defend its 
claims in our more enlightened time. Or to put 
it otherwise, it is said that the days are past when 
we could consider the history of the Bible as a 
kind of fairyland where wonders happened un¬ 
known elsewhere. Such dreams have faded in 
the morning light of the new knowledge, since 
they belonged rather to the twilight than to the 
noonday. 

We can only find the answer to such questions 
by considering the meaning of human history as 
interpreted by the Christian faith, and to this task 
we address ourselves in this chapter. 

Faith in a God such as Jesus proclaimed brings 
with it the belief that God must reveal Himself 
to man. As has often been pointed out, it belongs 
to the very nature of personality to seek fellow- 
ship with others. Friendship is one of the first 
conditions of health and “ the lack of fellow¬ 
ship is death.” Hence to Jesus God is like the 
shepherd who goes forth to seek his wandering 
sheep, or the father who longs for his rebellious 


JESUS CHRIST AND HISTORY 35 

son. If, then, there is in reality such a God, we 
must surely be able to find traces of His search 
for man through human history. 

Now, the Christian claim is that such traces 
are everywhere to be discerned, but that there is 
one historical line along which the footsteps of 
the divine are most manifest, and that this is 
the line which runs through the history of Israel, 
and leads us up to Jesus. This is another of the 
paradoxical claims of Christianity that rouse 
opposition in the minds of many. Men are still 
inclined to say that “ they didn’t know every¬ 
thing down in Judee.” The Hebrew race has 
made many notable contributions to human 
knowledge, but after all the assertion that it 
was God’s chosen people belongs to a bygone age 
and can hardly be maintained to-day. 

• It helps us when we remember that this special 
claim of the Hebrew people has always seemed 
incredible. We may turn our thoughts back to 
Babylon at the zenith of its power in the sixth 
century b.c. If we could have questioned a 
Babylonian statesman with some idea of the 
meaning of world-politics, and asked him what 
would be the future of the remnant of the Jewish 
people, there can be no doubt as to what he would 
have said. He would have said that there were 
many analogies to lead to the true answer. Many 
another people had been uprooted from its home 
and settled in the land of its conquerors. Within a 
few years it was absorbed into the larger popula¬ 
tion, contributing, doubtless, something to the 


36 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

life around it, but soon losing its national dis¬ 
tinctiveness. Obviously that was the destiny of 
the Jews. If it had been suggested to him that 
when Babylon was a ruin and its empire a memory 
the Jews would still remain, and their faith would 
have become the possession of the civilized 
world, it would have seemed to him the wildest 
fanaticism. The words of the great prophet of 
the Exile about all the nations of the world wait¬ 
ing and longing for the truth that only the meek 
and suffering Servant of the Lord could bring 
them, would have sounded to him like foolish and 
impertinent fancy. Yet this fancy is now a sober 
fact, and if we reject the Hebrew explanation of 
the fact we are bound to offer a better one. 

Let us turn back over the familiar ground of the 
Old Testament and ask what teaching we find 
there. 

(a) We find supremely the conviction of the 
sovereign rule of the one God of righteousness, 
the God who sat enthroned at the Flood and who 
is still above all the tumults of the world, whose 
voice sounds out above the noise and confusion 
and proclaims, “ Be still! and know that I 
am God.” There are numberless illustrations of 
this. We watch Isaiah in Jerusalem as the relent¬ 
less armies of Assyria overwhelm the Northern 
Kingdom and threaten to destroy Judah also. 
Yet this tremendous military power, overmaster¬ 
ing in its force, is to him nothing but a tool in 
the hand of the Holy One of Israel, to be used 
and broken and cast aside at His pleasure. Or 


JESUS CHRIST AND HISTORY 37 

we watch Jeremiah, that timid, shrinking youth, 
feeling himself nothing but a child in the face of 
the task committed to him, and yet note that the 
word of God entrusted to him means nothing less 
than the plucking up and breaking down, the 
destroying and overthrowing, the building and 
the planting of all the nations of the world. Or 
we turn to Maccabean times, when the little 
faithful remnant was harassed and persecuted, 
when it seemed hopeless that Jerusalem could 
ever be recovered and the religion of Israel sur¬ 
vive the storm. Then we open the Book of 
Daniel. We ponder the many-coloured pageant 
of history that passes there before our eyes. 
One thing is certain. The great heathen powers 
are brute beasts under the control of a Master. 
Their day will soon pass and then the everlasting 
kingdom of righteousness will be established. 
It has been truly said that in the Old Testament 
the problem is not whether good or evil is to 
prevail. That is a certainty. The only question 
is what God will do with the heathen powers, 
with Assyria or Babylon or Greece. 

( b ) But further we find in the story of Israel 
the gradual unfolding of the great truth of the 
vital union of morality and religion. The world 
has not yet outgrown the tendency to put reli¬ 
giousness in place of morality, to compound for 
neglect of its social duty by ritual performances 
or subscriptions to funds, or to rest on the pleas¬ 
ing emotional excitements of public worship 
whilst the heart remains cold to the needs of the 


38 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

world outside, or even of the neighbour in the 
next street. 

Nowhere else in the world’s literature is this 
tendency exposed with such scathing power as 
in the Old Testament writings. Such familiar 
illustrations as the words of Isaiah i. need only 
be mentioned in passing. But further, nowhere 
else is the real basis of social ethics laid down 
with such clearness. When we read in Leviticus : 
“ Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. 
1 am the Lord” we see the whole distinctiveness 
of the Old Testament teaching in these few words. 
Love to one’s neighbour is indissolubly linked 
with the sovereignty of God. It is because man 
has been made in the likeness of God, nearer to 
Him than all the rest of His creation, that the 
value of every individual life and the sacredness 
of personality are taught with growing distinct¬ 
ness. It is to be sure a study of arresting interest 
to watch the growth of this conception ; to see 
the extension of moral duty from the kinsman 
or tribesman to man as man ; or to mark the 
progress till Amos, for example, proclaims that 
the God of Israel will execute the judgments of 
righteousness over all the surrounding peoples 
for offences against common humanity. Such a 
study delivers us from the need which some of 
our fathers felt of justifying actions controlled 
by a rudimentary code of morals and an imperfect 
conception of God. But at every stage of this 
development we find the relationship between God 
and man set forth as the foundation of morality. 


JESUS CHRIST AND HISTORY 39 

We need not go far afield to find illustrations of 
the earlier stages even in modern life. In one 
of the big military camps in England in the earlier 
stages of the Great War there were in one hut 
three men who were notorious thieves, who 
knew a great deal about the inside of prisons. 
Their old propensities were so strong that the 
men in all the huts round found it necessary to 
keep a constant watch, and always to have an 
informal sentry on duty. Yet within the hut 
where they themselves lived it was quite safe to 
leave anything lying about, even money, and it 
was never touched. The thieves’ code of morals 
respected the property of those who were sharing 
the same hut, though it recognized no obligations 
to those outside. So the Old Testament narrator 
glories in the way in which David cheated Achish, 
pretending that he was ravaging his own people, 
whilst in reality he was carrying on pitiless raids 
against Geshurites and Amalekites. It is plain 
that the chronicler recognizes no moral duty 
towards them. They were, as he explains, “ the 
inhabitants of the land, which were of old,” and 
no doubt he thought them fair game. It is a 
very up-to-date story in a world which often 
thinks that savage races are the lawful prey of 
more cultivated peoples. It is a long way from 
there to the dream of the day when Israel, the 
Servant of the Lord, shall be “ a light to the 
Gentiles ; to open the blind eyes, to bring out the 
prisoners from the dungeons, and them that sit 
in darkness out of the prison house” But the 


4 o THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

story of the progress is unmistakable. We feel 
that the thought of God brooding over the great 
city of Nineveh, pitying its crowds of helpless 
and ignorant heathen, its multitudes of little 
children, its herds of cattle, as the Book of Jonah 
shows us, is the true development of the thought 
of God who chose Abraham ; whose enduring 
purpose is to teach men to think of one another 
as He thinks of them, and to treat one another as 
He treats them. The great controlling thought 
which shines out at last with perfect clearness 
is that you cannot deal rightly by any man till 
you have learnt his relationship to God. A man 
can only do justly and love mercy by walking 
humbly with God. 

(<:) Yet it may still be urged that after all, 
even though much of what has been said is 
granted, we are still far from proving the thesis 
with which we started, that in the history of 
Israel we find the central line of God’s revelation 
of Himself to man. It may be admitted that the 
great teachers of Israel have made imperishable 
contributions to the spiritual history of mankind, 
and that their message is still unexhausted, but 
it is still far from being demonstrated that be¬ 
cause of that Israel must be considered as a 
people apart. We are debtors to all the past, to 
Greece and Rome no less than to Israel. Why 
should we isolate Israel ? Why not rather trace 
the footsteps of God all through the long journey 
of humanity towards truth and knowledge ? It 
is a fair question and demands a reasoned answer. 


JESUS CHRIST AND HISTORY 41 

First, then, following our modern psychological 
method, we must inquire into the consciousness 
of the men through whom these messages came. 
At once we find them possessed by an inward 
certainty of God. Take, again, the one who is, 
perhaps, the greatest of them all—Jeremiah. 
We see him rebelling against the call which he 
would fain refuse. Yet the word that came to 
him was like an inward fire which he could not 
restrain. He was compelled to utter it even 
though it burnt up all that was pleasant and 
desirable in his own life. It made him a lonely 
man, it exposed him to hatred and contempt, it 
branded him as an outcast and a traitor. Yet 
though he resented fiercely the summons that 
came to him he could never doubt that it was 
from God. And at last, with his own life in 
ruins and Jerusalem in the power of the enemy, he 
spoke his noblest word of all, of the coming day 
when in the gladness of the New Covenant all 
men should know God and live at peace. 

But, further, this consciousness was not that 
of a solitary thinker. The pioneers of truth have 
often been lonely and misunderstood, and yet so 
certain of what they have discovered that they 
could not hide it for all that the world could 
offer. They have often found the truth of Plato’s 
words about the ideal man : “ In such a situation 
the just man will be scourged, racked, fettered, 
will have his eyes burnt out, and at last, after 
suffering every kind of torture, will be crucified.”* 

* Republic, 362 . 


42 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

But the differentia of the prophets of Israel is 
that however lonely they felt themselves in their 
personal lot, they were all alike conscious of 
being in a national succession. They belonged 
to a nation which had been chosen by God and 
sealed to Himself by a Covenant in history. 
They criticized with all their force the popular 
idea that the nation was God’s favourite, and 
taught that His choice of them brought duties 
rather than privileges. But they never doubted 
the choice and the call itself. Israel—the thought 
becomes ever clearer—was a nation with a world¬ 
wide mission, and its task was the establishment 
of God’s Kingdom upon earth. We may surely 
say that such a consciousness of national destiny 
is unique. 

Yet it may still be urged that this conscious¬ 
ness was mistaken. We may recognize and 
inherit the spiritual truths that these great pio¬ 
neers discovered. But whilst the truths are the 
precious kernel, the outward expectations are the 
husk that may be thrown away. In one sense 
this is true. We do not look to see, with some of 
them, an earthly kingdom with its centre at 
Jerusalem. The discipline of history has dis¬ 
solved that dream. Yet whilst the form of the 
dream has passed, we hold that the substance 
remains. At the root of their experience lay the 
deep conviction that through their race God was 
preparing some greater and fuller revelation of 
Himself. We claim that history has justified 
this belief because the Jewish race culminated in 


JESUS CHRIST AND HISTORY 43 

Jesus Christ. As we explain the beginning by 
the end, the seed by the fruit, so we explain the 
story of Israel by the person of Jesus. If the 
history of Israel had not found its crown in Jesus 
its claim to uniqueness would be much weakened. 
If He is not a unique Person, Israel is not a unique 
people. But if He is, as we have urged, the 
central Person in human history, then the nation 
from which He sprang can maintain its claim to 
be God’s chosen people. The two thoughts are 
indissolubly bound together. 

Christian faith has always been conscious of 
this, though it has sometimes expressed itself 
in ways that are strange to our ways of think¬ 
ing. There have been those who found Christ 
everywhere in the Old Testament, who saw 
even the less important details of His life fore¬ 
shadowed in dark prophetic words, or in obscure 
ritual observances. We have grown beyond this 
mode of exposition now, but the essential truth 
which it sought to express still remains. The 
Bible is unique because it brings Christ to us. In 
His manifestation we see a great historic redemp¬ 
tive act of God. Looking backwards we see the 
preparation for this act in the history of Israel. 
We trace the growth, through ignorance and 
error and wrong, of the faith in the one almighty, 
all-holy God. We follow, through all its various 
phases, the expectation of some fuller and final 
revelation. And we draw the conclusion of John 
that whilst the Light was always in the world, 
shining on darkened hearts that only discerned 


44 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

fugitive glimpses of it, in Babylon and in Athens, 
as well as in Jerusalem, yet all the time God was 
cleaving “ a channel for the waterflood, a way 
for the lightning of the thunder,” and that chan¬ 
nel and that way lay along the history of Israel. 

This is the Christian philosophy of history. 
We find it in Origen. He writes: “ For no 
noble deed among men has ever been done with¬ 
out the Divine Word visiting the souls of those 
who even for a brief space were able to receive 
such operations.” And he concludes : “ There 
is nothing absurd in the fact that to the Jews, 
with whom were the prophets, the Son of God 
was sent ; so that beginning with them in bodily 
form He might arise in power and spirit upon a 
world of souls desiring to be no longer bereft 
of God.”* 


• Origen adv. Celsum, vi. 78, 79. 


CHAPTER V 


* 


THE FACT OF SIN 

I F we survey the ground which we have 
covered we see that man, with his manifold 
nature and varied needs, cries out for a God 
that can complete his personality and give him a 
sure foundation for life and hope. We see 
further the claim of Christianity that God 
has always been seeking to make Himself known 
to men and that He has done this, finally, by 
revealing Himself in Jesus Christ. We must now 
go further still and ask whether revelation is the 
last word, or whether there is not a deeper need 
still, the need of Redemption. 

At the heart of the Christian faith lies the 
conviction that man is a sinful being needing 
God’s forgiveness and moral renewal. God’s 
love to the world and the world’s resistance to 
the love of God are the two great facts that the 
Christian theologian has to set forth and explain. 

Now, in considering this position we have to 
mediate between two tendencies. On the one 
hand, there are those who assert that forgiveness 
is inevitable. Of course, God forgives ; “ c’est 
son metier ,” that is what He is for, said Heine. 

45 


46 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

On the other hand, there are those who proclaim 
that forgiveness is impossible. We live in a 
world of inexorable consequences. We must pay 
in full the price for all our follies and mistakes. 
Neither whining nor praying can set us free from 
the chains we have bound round our own limbs. 
What we need is the manly courage that does not 
fear to face facts, but makes the best of the 
strength that remains unimpaired. Neither posi¬ 
tion can satisfy us. The former cuts the nerve 
of morality and is destructive of moral earnest¬ 
ness. The second drives us back to Stoicism and 
the despair of human progress. Yet, after all, 
we have an uneasy consciousness that the 
Christian message does not, as once it did, win 
its answer of penitent confession from human 
hearts. Changed views of human origins make 
men less ready to affirm : “ there is no health in 
us,” or at any rate, less ready to charge them¬ 
selves with responsibility for such a fact. At the 
same time the new calls to service for others, the 
tasks of social reconstruction, the opportunities 
of making the world a brighter and happier home 
for our fellows, make the ancient expressions of 
penitence begin to savour of the cloister and the 
cell, with a kind of mustiness that the fresh 
breezes of life dispel. Tell a man that he is a 
sinner and he listens languidly and unmoved. 
Set before him some great programme of self- 
denying toil for the good of humanity, and all 
that is virile and heroic within him responds to 
the summons. 


THE FACT OF SIN 47 

Let us, therefore, in this chapter inquire into 
the real meaning of the fact that men have always 
and everywhere, with the consciousness of God 
discovered the consciousness of sin. 

One of the most modern passages in the Bible 
is the 7th chapter of the Epistle to the Romans. 
St. Paul does not appeal to any external authority 
or creed, he explores the depths of his own con¬ 
sciousness. Conscious of the moral struggles 
and disorders of maturer years, he turns back 
longingly to the happy time when no stings of 
accusing conscience forbade him to rest in peace. 
Then he lived in the lost paradise of innocent 
childhood. But he is certain of this, that as soon 
as ever he became conscious of the moral law he 
knew that he had broken it. That seems to be 
the universal experience. As we grow up into 
moral self-consciousness and begin to examine our 
own experience, we find from the first a sense of 
failure and of wrong. It is not that we have any 
distinct recollection of some first definite act 
of wrong-doing, it is rather that with the growth 
from unconscious infancy into childhood and 
youth comes the sense of imperfection and of 
fault. 

We may take another illustration from Dr. 
Rufus Jones’s charming book, A Boy's Religion 
From Memory. He says there: “ I meant to be 
good. I knew I ought to be. Almost from baby¬ 
hood I had been told that God wanted to use me 
in His service, but spite of everything I was for 
ever finding myself in the wrong path. The 


48 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

h a ppy period of innocence—the brief lease of 
the Garden of Eden which every child all uncon¬ 
sciously has—was soon over for me. The first 
mouthful of the apple of the tree of the knowledge 
of good and evil is back of the period of memory, 
but as far back as I can go I find my Eden very 
badly lost.”* 

Here then we find the basis of the doctrine of 
sin. It is grounded on a universal fact. It may, 
of course, be argued that such a statement is 
simply wrong because there are those who deny 
that they have or ever had such a consciousness. 
To that one can only reply in the words of Henry 
Sidgwick as to the ultimate nature of moral 
obligation: “ I am aware that some persons will 
be disposed to answer all the preceding argument 
by a simple denial that they can find in their 
consciousness any such unconditional or cate¬ 
gorical imperative as I have been trying to 
exhibit. If this is really the final result of self- 
examination in any case, there is no more to be 
said. I, at least, do not know how to impart the 
notion of moral obligation to anyone who is 
entirely devoid of it.” t So we may add that we 
have nothing to say to those w r ho are not con¬ 
scious what unfulfilled moral obligation means. 
We can only appeal to the constant testimony of 
the wisest and best of our race, and repeat that 
they have always felt that when the command¬ 
ment came sin sprang to life. 

Proceeding a step further it is manifestly right 

• Op. cit., p. 68. f Methods of Ethics, p. 35. 


THE FACT OF SIN 49 

to say that a universal fact presupposes a law. 
Its universality forbids us to seek for its explana¬ 
tion either in chance, or in the actions of individ¬ 
ual wills. It must have some adequate cause. 
The Christian doctrine of Original Sin, satirized 
and ridiculed as it has often been, was at least a 
serious attempt to formulate this law. We shall 
return to it later. Meantime, we may consider 
two other attempts to formulate such a law, each 
widely current at the present day. 

[a) It is not unnatural to explain a universal 
fact as an inevitable result of the nature or stage 
of growth of the beings in whom it is found. If 
all men are sinners, then, it may be urged, sin, 
whatever it is, must be as natural to man as 
language is. It is normal for human beings to 
learn to talk, else they would never learn to 
think. So it is normal for them to perform what 
we call sinful actions, because in no other way 
could they discover what manhood really is. 
In one form or another this conception has a long 
history. There are some suggestions of it in 
the Old Testament. In the Book of Job it is 
said that man is impure in God’s sight because 
his nature is material, the physical is also the 
morally frail. Perfection belongs to the Eternal 
One alone, and even the angels are charged with 
folly in His presence. So elsewhere we find man’s 
physical weakness pleaded as a reason why God 
should be merciful to his sinfulness. 

In more philosophical forms this view is always 
with us. Leaving out of sight the forms of 


50 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

thought which teach that matter is essentially 
evil, we find the view that as man passes from the 
unconscious innocence of childhood to the self- 
determined virtue of maturer years, the stage of 
sin is inevitable. Perilous though the journey 
may be, since no one can make it without falling 
into some of the pitfalls of the road that must be 
followed, there is no other way of coming to be a 
person. If this is so it is enough for us to main¬ 
tain the difference between virtue and sin, and 
to affirm that virtue is the greater good of the 
two. There is no point in affirming that sin 
ought not to be or that it is “ absolutely and 
positively bad.” To do this, says Dr. McTag- 
gart, “ is useless to morality and fatal to religion.” 
He finds hope in the belief that “ in the long run 
sin must always disgust the person who commits 
it.” 

When examined more closely there is little 
ground for hope in such a position. When 
thought out it leads to the obvious fallacy that a 
full knowledge of evil is necessary to a full 
experience of virtue. It suggests that the self 
remains the same throughout and that when tired 
of the practice of evil it is just as capable as ever 
of becoming virtuous. This is plainly untrue. 
It may be that every form of sin leads to disgust 
and satiety. But it does not follow that the 
sin-wearied man will turn towards virtue. A far 
deeper psychology is found in our Lord’s teaching 
about the Empty House, in Luke xi. There 
we hear of a man from whose heart an evil spirit 


THE FACT OF SIN 51 

departs, leaving his home vacant for a time. 
This is a picture of a man who has grown out of 
one form of evil, as old age grows out of the 
passionate sins of youth. Yet, presently, since 
the house still remains without a tenant, worse 
forms of evil come and take possession of it. 

The truth of this is manifest. The cold and 
hard cynicism of a man who has tried many forms 
of wrong-doing, and has abandoned them because 
they no longer interest him, is the most hopeless 
state that can be conceived, and the farthest 
removed from real virtue. Moreover, such 
theories are more fit for the study and the lecture- 
room than for the market place. The spirit of 
remorse will not be exorcized by telling the 
sinner that his wrong-doing has helped to make 
him a man. It has made him the man he is, but 
not the man he ought to be. He knows that in 
his own life and that of others there are sinful 
acts where the evil is vastly greater than any 
possible good that can flow from them, acts which 
mar the life of the individual and hinder the 
progress of society. Conscience tells him inexor¬ 
ably that sin is more than infirmity, more than 
human weakness. He cannot be persuaded, in 
the long run, that conscience is deceiving him. 

( b) Yet, after all, there is much that is true in 
the opinions just described. So soon as a man 
seriously faces the moral problems of life he is 
driven to make three affirmations. First, he 
says, “ I am a sinful man” No sophistry can 
hide that fact. Next he goes on to declare, 


52 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

“ I have a sinful nature.” He finds within him¬ 
self tendencies toward evil that are far deeper 
than conscious moral choice. Lastly, as he looks 
round upon the world of men, he is bound to 
assert, “ I belong to a sinful race.” If, then, 
man’s nature is sinful, must we not also say that 
it is defective ? And, if so, why may not sin be 
regarded as the consequence of our present im¬ 
perfection ? 

There is one famous answer to this question 
on which we must dwell for a moment. We find 
it expounded with terrific energy by Augustine. 
To him human nature fresh from God was pure 
and stainless. For a brief moment in man’s 
long history his nature was free from every taint 
of evil. Then followed the tragic and fatal act 
of our first ancestors. Human nature as a whole 
became defiled and utterly corrupt. It is this 
corrupted nature which we inherit from our 
parents. The sins which we commit are not 
stepping stones on the steep ascent to virtue, they 
are stages on the road to everlasting death. 

If we ask why this view, in spite of its harsh¬ 
ness, has had so powerful an influence in human 
thought, the answer is not far to seek. Augustine 
held tenaciously to the solidarity of mankind. 
Not for him the exaggerated individualism which 
would treat humanity as beginning afresh with 
the birth of each child, coming fresh and stainless 
from the hand of the Creator. He knew the 
strength of the ties that unite us to the past, that 
we bring with us into our lives much of our ances- 


THE FACT OF SIN 


53 

tors and can never escape from them. That we 
cannot follow him in many of his conclusions is 
due, not to any keener moral vision, but to the 
new light as to the origin and early history of man¬ 
kind which has dawned upon these later days. 

(c) We turn, then, to the restatement of our 
question in the light of Anthropology and the 
doctrine of Evolution. No one who considers 
this subject can escape from a debt of gratitude 
to Dr. F. R. Tennant for his illuminating dis¬ 
cussions, and for the time w r e must follow his 
exposition. He points us to the fact that before 
the race attained full moral personality it had 
passed through a long previous history. Sin was 
to begin with the survival of habits and tenden¬ 
cies which were not originally sinful, but became 
so when they were persisted in in resistance to 
the higher forces, which could not at first be 
recognized as making for righteousness. The 
sinfulness of these habits when persisted in lies, 
as Archdeacon Wilson said, 44 in their anachron¬ 
ism ; in their resistance to the evolutionary and 
Divine force that makes for moral development 
and righteousness.” We find the same thought, 
differently expressed, in Browning. 

What I aspired to be, 

And was not, comforts me: 

A brute I might have been, but would not sink i’ 
the scale. 

That is to say, it is man’s aspirations to rise 
above the brutish tendencies of his nature that 


54 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

are the real mark of his humanity. He fails when 
he ceases to struggle and drops back to the level 
of the beast. It is for man, says the poet, to 
make his bodily powers help, and not hinder, 
the life of the soul, so that, body and soul to¬ 
gether, he may grow upwards towards perfec¬ 
tion. 

Dr. Tennant goes on to show that we can ob¬ 
serve the same process in the growth of moral 
self-consciousness in a child. There is a non- 
moral period first. Then the power of will and 
the duty of choice begin to emerge. The task 
of morality “ consists in the formation of the 
non-moral material of nature into character, in 
subjecting the seething and tumultuous life of 
natural tendency, of appetite and passion, affec¬ 
tion and desire, to the moulding influence of 
reflective purpose. Here, and not in any univer¬ 
sal and hereditarily transmitted disturbance of 
man’s nature, is to be found the occasion or source 
of universal sinfulness. It is simply the general 
failure to effect on all occasions the moralization 
of inevitable impulses and to choose the end of 
higher worth rather than that which, of lower 
value, appeals with the more clamorous inten¬ 
sity.”* Dr. Tennant agrees that with the dawn 
of moral consciousness we find ourselves to be 
sinful. But he thinks that we err if we proceed 
to judge that we have always been sinful, “ sub¬ 
ject from birth to an indwelling power of sin.” 
“ What introspection really discovers is an inter- 
* Origin and Propagation oj Sin, p. no. 


THE FACT OF SIN 55 

nal conflict between nature and nurture, natural 
desire and moral end ; and this is the inevitable 
condition of human life and the expression of 
God’s purpose.” He strongly urges that this 
teaching does not destroy the sinfulness of sin. 
“ If sin can be traced back, in race and single 
person, to the transgression of a sanction not 
then recognized as that of God, it loses nothing 
of its exceeding sinfulness for us to whom it is 
none the less a deliberate grieving of the Holy 
Spirit.”* “ Man’s condition denotes on our 
theory of sin a parody of God’s purpose in human 
history, though not a fall from an actual state of 
original righteousness.”! 

What light does such an exposition throw upon 
the three fundamental propositions which we 
found lying at the base of the doctrine of sin ? 
It leaves untouched the first and the third—that 
I am a sinful man, and that I belong to a sinful 
race. But it goes far in helping us to under¬ 
stand the second—that I have a sinful nature. 
What is man when he is born ? Is he, as some 
philosophers once taught, a sheet of white paper 
on which the world writes its signature, or an 
empty room rapidly filling up with impressions 
from without ? Not so. He is the heir of all 
the past. As modern psychology teaches us, he 
is born with a mass of instincts, stirring within 
him and moving him to the appropriate action, 
long before the dawn either of the consciousness 
of self or of the sense of moral duty. Some of 

* Ibid., p. 112. f Ibid., p. 122. 


56 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

these instincts, notably those of pugnacity, of 
self-assertion, of acquisition, express themselves 
so powerfully that as moral consciousness dawns 
the possessor finds that already : 

The state of man, 

Like to a little kingdom, suffers then 

The nature of an insurrection. 

He tries to reduce this state to order and fails 
and cries despairingly, “ I have a sinful nature.” 
But is he right in saying this ? If to have a sinful 
nature means that he is at once personally and 
individually responsible for what he is, then the 
affirmation is wrong. But if he means that he 
has been born with a nature that is sinful because 
it falls short of what God meant it to be, then he 
is surely right. Generations of wrong-doing and 
self-assertion have strengthened the instincts 
that lead to what he now knows as evil. The 
social ideals that surround him, manifested in 
the behaviour of his own family and friends and 
people, are faulty. He is far from what he might 
have been, just as mankind, with its warships 
and poison gases and bitter quarrels and envyings 
in the twentieth century after Christ, is far from 
what it might have been if only it had learned 
to follow the ideals of Jesus. We are caught in a 
mesh from which neither the individual nor the 
race can deliver itself. The world is still, as 
Paul saw it, “ groaning and travailing in pain,” 
full of yearning for a Deliverer. This is a sin- 
stricken world, and needs a Saviour. 


CHAPTER VI 


THE MEANING OF THE CROSS 

W E have seen that history and experience 
alike compel us to own the tragic reality 
of moral evil. How, then, is it possible 
to reconcile this with faith in the Lord and Father 
of our Lord Jesus Christ ? Do not the world’s 
shame and wrong point to the conclusion that 
man is left to himself to struggle upwards as best 
he may ? How can we believe that there is a 
God who really knows and cares whilst so many 
facts appear to deny it ? 

This is a question as old as humanity, and it 
becomes increasingly plain that no answer can 
be given to it unless Christianity can declare 
some new truth about God which will help to 
solve the problem. Let us go on to inquire what 
the teaching of Christianity is. 

Now it is manifest that there have been many 
days in human history when the triumph of 
evil and the overthrow of righteousness have led 
men to deny passionately that there is any power 
at all that makes for goodness. Some have held 
on to their faith in spite of everything. They 

57 


58 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

have comforted themselves by saying with 
Lowell : 

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the 
throne,— 

Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the 
dim unknown, 

Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above 
His own. 

There is strength in such teaching. It is good 
to believe, even when so many ideals lie shattered 
amidst the wreckage of the Great War, that the 
cause of righteousness must prevail. Whether 
this trust can maintain itself to-day is another 
matter. It seems to rest on the belief in human 
progress, and that very belief is insistently 
challenged from many sides. Though there is a 
struggle for existence among ideas, “ it does not 
necessarily follow/’ writes Dr. Inge, “ that the 
ideas which prevail are better morally, or even 
truer to the law of Nature, than those which 
fail.”* If faith is to triumph it must show a 
God not only keeping watch within the shadow, 
but active in human life. Can Christianity do 
this ? 

Let us go back to the day of the Crucifixion and 
ponder what it must have meant to all who be¬ 
lieved in goodness. We think of the pure and 
stainless human life that was being ended on the 
Cross. We see Jesus walking through Palestine 
with His face radiant with the certainty of the 
Father’s love. He had staked everything on 

* Outspoken Essays, Series %, p. sS*. 


THE MEANING OF THE CROSS 59 

God and risked all for His sake. Yet now He 
hangs helpless on the Cross and from the gather¬ 
ing gloom there come those awful words: “ My 
God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me ? ” 
Where was God then ? Is it enough to say that 
He was really there, only within the shadow ? 
Is it enough to say that the Cross of Christ has, 
indeed, swayed the future by its undying message 
of heroism and devotion ? There is truth in this, 
but it falls immeasurably short of what Christian¬ 
ity affirms. Where was God when Jesus hung 
on the Cross ? In the shadow ? Not so! Let 
us listen to Paul. “ God was in Christ ! ” In 
the midst of it all, on the Cross, burdened, suffer¬ 
ing, stricken, “ God was in Christ, reconciling 
the world unto Himself.” It is a tremendous 
answer. If it is true, it has endless consequences. 
What God was then He is always. So, then, He 
is not now within the shadow, keeping watch, but 
rather, in the midst of the world’s suffering and 
sin, suffering with us, bearing our burdens with 
us, that we may be delivered from their shame 
and curse. We never approach the central mean¬ 
ing of Christianity till we have grappled with this 
teaching and wrought out, as far as we may, its 
consequences for ourselves and for humanity. 

We cannot miss the fact that this is a start¬ 
lingly novel thought about God. Many times in 
the religious thought of mankind the gods have 
appeared as merciful, forgiving the wrongs done 
to their laws. More often they have appeared 
as the righteous avengers of evil, bound them- 


6o 


THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

selves to obey, as in Greek tragedy, the inevitable 
laws that bind punishment to ill desert. Some¬ 
times, again, the gods were thought of as living 
in a blessedness of their own, immeasurably 
removed from the struggles and pains of men, 
and altogether untouched by them. It is true, 
indeed, that there have been stories of gods who 
became men and lived on earth for a time. But 
the thought that in the human Jesus dwelt all the 
fullness of the Godhead in bodily form, and that 
the Incarnation took place that God might de¬ 
liver man from his evil state by sharing it with 
him, is the great distinctive mark of Christianity 
alone. 

So soon as we begin to ponder this teaching 
we discern its supreme moral value. 

In the first place it manifests the truth that 
man can only be saved by fellowship. Preaching 
to men from a height is useless by itself. Just as 
no man can attain to moral maturity except 
through the society of his fellows, so no man can 
escape from moral evil save through the fellow¬ 
ship of those who are better than himself. Even 
the appeal to the better nature of a man is useless 
unless that better nature striving upwards can 
meet the warmth and stimulus of friendship and 
of love. Similarly no man can save another 
except by giving himself to him. Christianity 
teaches that God gave, and still gives, Himself to 
save men. 

Moreover, the friendship that gives itself to 
save another must shrink from nothing in the 


THE MEANING OF THE CROSS 61 

acceptance of all the consequences that such self¬ 
surrender brings. It must be ready to give all 
and to bear all. Is not this exactly what Chris¬ 
tianity tells us that God did in the gift of Christ ? 
All that He had He gave. He spared not His 
own Son, but freely gave Him up for us all. Real 
fellowship shrinks from no consequences, it 
gladly accepts them all. 

When we try to understand this teaching we 
often stumble just because we are confused as to 
the meaning of the word “ consequences.” We 
are haunted by the thought that to bear the con¬ 
sequences of another’s wrong-doing means to 
accept the punishment due to him. Many 
theories of the Atonement perplex and repel us 
just because of this misconception. Surely, we 
say, punishment never can be transferred! If 
we could transfer it, it would be morally wrong to 
do so. Since all righteous punishment is inflicted 
as moral discipline, to save a wrong-doer from 
such discipline would often mean the taking 
away of his hope of deliverance. But, actually, 
in the nature of things, punishment cannot be 
transferred, since even if another bore the punish¬ 
ment due to a sinner, he would not be punished, 
he would only suffer innocently. This seems un- 
challengeably true. Yet, in a very real sense the 
man who gives himself to save another bears the 
consequences of his sin. It is clear that he bears 
it first by sympathy because, with his purer moral 
insight, he feels more keenly the degradation of 
his friend. It is a strange perversity of thought 


6 i THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

which supposes that only a sinful man is able to 
sympathize with a sinner. On the contrary, 
sinners are not fit to judge of sin. As Martineau 
wrote, in a great sermon on Christ’s Treatment of 
Guilt: “ The blindness which is induced by all 
deliberate injury to our moral nature, and which 
thickens its film as the habit grows, is one of the 
most appalling expressions of the justice of God. 
Moral evil is the only thing in His creation of 
which it is decreed, that the more we are familiar 
with it, the less shall we know of it. The mind 
that is rich in holiness and the humanities, appre¬ 
ciates every temptation, computes the force of 
every passion, and discerns the degradation of 
every vice, with a precision and clearness un¬ 
known to the adept in wrong.” There is no 
sympathy like that of a pure and holy love, that 
feels intensely the shame of the fallen one, and 
sees with clear vision the distance between the 
depths to which the wrong-doer has sunk and the 
ideal which was possible. That is a consequence 
from which love can never escape. 

But, further, the real friend bears the conse¬ 
quences of his friend’s wrong-doing by sharing his 
life with him. Whilst others ostracize the wrong¬ 
doer he cleaves to him. He reveals a love un¬ 
checked by ingratitude and undismayed by the 
company into which it is dragged. Such a love 
hopeth all things and believeth all things, and 
will never leave the one beloved even though it is 
dragged down to degradation and to outward ruin. 

It should not be said that such a love is 


THE MEANING OF THE CROSS 63 

unthinkable. Few of us do not know some 
shining instance where husband or wife, or father 
or mother, or friend, has borne all for the sake of 
love. To know such things exalts and purifies 
our own souls and assures our faith in goodness. 

Is not this the very teaching of the Cross ? 
We are sometimes told that we must choose 
between the older teaching of a God who punished 
Jesus instead of us and the teaching of a God who, 
by a display of love, overcomes our stubbornness 
and draws us out toward Himself. But, surely, 
it is the word “ display ” that is wrong. There is 
no display about love. Without thought of self 
it loses self in the service of others. We may 
ponder the words in which Dr. G. B. Stevens sums 
up the teaching of Bushnell: “ Christ’s moral 
power is not the power of mere example, nor the 
revelation of God’s love alone, but in His suffer¬ 
ing and death we behold the operation in salva¬ 
tion of all God’s perfections.”* The meaning of 
the Cross, wherein is summed up and completed 
the whole meaning of the life of Jesus, is not 
example, nor revelation, but action. God does 
not coax men to be good, He acts. He does more 
than plead, He shares our life up to the bitter 
end. It is not substitution but identification. 
God is active in the world to-day, and He will not 
cease to strive till in fellowship with Himself 
men are lifted up above the power of evil. That 
is the message of the Cross. 

We may go on to ask why such teaching, if 

* The Christian Doctrine of Salvation, p. 236. 


6 \ THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

really true, is not more effective, and whether 
present hatred and evil in the world do not 
prove that what we are saying is mere sentiment. 
We may answer surely that the reason for this is 
partly because the message has been so imper¬ 
fectly grasped, and partly because even nominally 
Christian people have been so slow to apply the 
method of reconciliation which they ought to 
have learned from the New Testament. If this 
last suggestion is true we need not seek further for 
an answer. Jesus said : “ If ye forgive not men 
their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive 
your trespasses.” This is not a threat so much 
as the statement of a principle. Until men have 
learned to apply God’s way of reconciliation in their 
relations to their fellows they cannot understand 
it as applied to themselves. Until they learn to 
love they cannot understand a God who is love. 
Hence they remain unreconciled to God because 
they are unreconciled to one another. It is not 
hard to see that if God’s method of reconciliation 
began by His sharing the lives of men who had 
offended against Him, most of us have been very 
slow to copy Him. Let us take an illustration 
from one of our great teachers, never nominally 
a Christian, but who has an uncanny knack of 
piercing into the depths of human nature. In 
1 The Ordeal of Richard Fever el we remember how 
Richard had thrashed Benson, the butler, for 
spying on him, and Benson was waiting for the 
apology which had been promised him. Mere¬ 
dith draws an inimitable picture of Benson. 


THE MEANING OF THE CROSS 65 

“ Heavy Benson was told to anticipate the de¬ 
mand for pardon, and practised in his mind the 
most melancholy Christian deportment he could 
assume.” And then follow the words : “ Dam¬ 
natory doctrines best pleased Benson. Benson 
was ready to pardon, as a Christian should, but 
he did want his enemy before him on his knees.” 
Here, as so often in Meredith, we are afraid that 
we are peering into a looking-glass, and seeing a 
portrait, not very much distorted, of ourselves. 
Are we not disposed to say : “ Let us see the 

signs of penitence and then it will be time to think 
about forgiveness. Till then, we will wait. It 
is he who is in the wrong. Let him take the first 
step. Why should I expose myself to the risk of 
misunderstanding or humiliation by going out of 
my way to look for him ? ” But God did not 
wait. He began to seek men whilst they were still 
hard and impenitent, making His sun shine and 
His rain fall on the unthankful and the evil, bear¬ 
ing, in Jesus, all the gainsaying of sinners against 
Himself, all the excuses and quibbles that show 
up the real inward nature of those who make them. 
The wrong was with men, the initiative was with 
Him. It is because our practice is so unlike this 
that we find it so hard to understand Him. 

Yet it may be urged that after all our moral 
analysis is not deep enough because reconciliation 
is a two-sided relation, and cannot be complete 
unless both parties are agreed. In particular 
where a real wrong has been done it is essential 
that the offender should see his wrong and admit 


66 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

it. Before a broken friendship can be restored 
the two friends must be at one in their moral 
judgment of the evil that caused the rupture. It 
is of no use to ignore the offence, or, as we say 
nowadays, to drive it down into the unconscious. 
It will remain there as an irritant, poisoning the 
springs of life, and preventing any real unity of 
life. Doubtless all this is true. We may illus¬ 
trate again from a great work of imagination. 
When Arthur Donnithorne, light-heartedly, and 
with no real sense of wrong, asked Adam Bede 
to forgive him, Adam said : “ We’re not friends, 
and it’s better not to pretend it. I know forgive¬ 
ness is a man’s duty, but, to my thinking, that 
can only mean as you’re to give up all thoughts 
o’ taking revenge : it can never mean as you’re 
to have all your old feelings back again, for that’s 
not possible. He’s not the same man to me, and 
I can’t feel the same towards him. God help 
me! ” But later, even when he knows that the 
wrong committed has been immeasurably w'orse 
than he had dreamed of before, the sight of Arthur’s 
suffering for his sin, and his real and bitter sorrow 7 
for what he has done, opens the way for a recon¬ 
ciliation. “ I’ve no right,” says Adam, “ to be 
hard towards them as have done wrong and 
repent,” and the two men clasp hands, “ and 
with that action there was a strong rush, on both 
sides, of the old, boyish affection.” Here we 
note how the impossible becomes actual, as the 
old feeling springs to life once more. This is true 
forgiveness. 


THE MEANING OF THE CROSS 67 

What conclusion are we to draw from this ? 
If we go back to the New Testament the answer 
is plain. Reconciliation, in the fullest sense, is 
impossible without penitence. But God did not 
wait till men were sorry before He was gracious 
to them, He made them sorry by being good to 
them. Again it is at the Cross that we learn this. 
A man may be hard and defiant and on the defen¬ 
sive against all suggestions that he has anything 
really to be ashamed of. But the meaning of the 
Cross begins to dawn upon him. There comes, 
as Dr. Moberly writes, “ a little turning of the 
face to the east, a little melting of the stiffness of 
heart, a little kindling of a new desire, a little 
lighting of the flame of the spirit,” and then the 
overwhelming sense of sin, and the cry, “ God 
be merciful to me a sinner.” That has been the 
path of deliverance for many and it is still God’s 
way of hope. Applied to human relationships it 
would transform society. If, instead of waiting 
for those who have wronged us to repent, we 
continued to do them good in every possible way, 
showing our readiness to enter into their lives, 
and to share their burdens with them, we should 
win them in ways that now seem incredible. 
How true it is to say that Christianity has very 
rarely been really tried! 

Let us ask as we close this chapter how far 
such teaching meets the questions that older 
views of the Atonement sought to answer. In 
the first place it surely shows “ how awful good¬ 
ness is.” Goodness cannot live with evil. It 


68 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

cannot ignore it with easy good nature. It must 
destroy it. Sin that has become lodged in 
human nature must not be covered up. It must 
be burnt out. “ Our God is a consuming fire.” 
Can we find a more overwhelming demonstration 
of God’s horror of evil than in the suffering of God 
in Christ ? Sin killed Jesus, and broke His 
heart. God help us if it has never broken ours! 

Further, such teaching surely reveals the 
passion of God for holiness. So far from His 
remaining unmoved, He is shown to be intensely 
active in His conflict against evil. We see Jesus 
entering into the darkness, until at last the con¬ 
sciousness of the world’s sin veils for the moment 
God’s face from Him. Yet even there He does 
not falter. He held fast to God, trusting where 
He could not see His face. Long ago Dale, 
grappling with the problem of forgiveness, 
maintained that if a righteous God did not punish 
sin, “ some other divine act of at least equal 
intensity, and in which the ill desert of sin is 
expressed with at least equal energy, must take 
its place.’’ * Dale found this act expressed when, 
as he says, “ He was forsaken of the Father, and 
He died.” We cannot follow Dale there. Some 
words of an older writer come back to our minds 
when George Macdonald writes : “ God was His 
God still, although He had forsaken Him—for¬ 
saken His vision that His faith might glow out 
triumphant; forsaken Himself* No; come nearer 
to Him than ever; come nearer, even as—but with 

* The Atonement, p. 391. 


THE MEANING OF THE CROSS 69 

a yet deeper, more awful pregnancy of import— 
even as the Lord Himself withdrew from the 
bodily eyes of His friends, that He might dwell 
in their profoundest being.”* If God was in 
Christ on the Cross, He was there when the dark¬ 
ness was deepest; then, most of all. And yet 
Dale was right in struggling to express the 
thought that we must find some tremendous 
moral act of God declaring His holiness. But we 
find this in the whole life of Jesus, growing more 
and more manifest as He becomes despised and 
rejected of men, and culminating in the agony of 
the Passion and the Cross. As we ponder the 
revelation of the character of God that is made 
we find ourselves repeating the words of Bushnell: 
“ There is a cross in God before the wood is 
seen upon Calvary; hid in God’s own virtue 
itself, struggling on heavily in burdened feeling 
through all the previous ages, and struggling as 
heavily now, even in the throne of the worlds.”f 
Is this the God whom Jesus revealed ? This 
is the ultimate question, since all our thoughts of 
God must meet that test. Jesus tells us that we 
shall be like God, sons of our Father, when we 
love our enemies and pray for them that persecute 
us. “ But love your enemies, and do them good, 
and lend, never despairing . . . and ye shall be 
sons of the Most High.” This is what we have 
found about God when we have seen Him re¬ 
vealed in Christ upon the Cross. We may ask 

* Unspoken Sermons, i, p. 168. 

t The Vicarious Sacrifice, p. 73. 


70 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

with R. Browning, “ Did man invent this story ? ” 
“ Is it not too supernatural not to be true ? ” 
and then learn from him to— 

Stand before that fact, that Life and Death, 

Stay there at gaze, till it dispart, dispread. 

As though a star should open out, all sides, 

Grow the world on you, as it is my world. 


CHAPTER VII 


THE TACT OF CONVERSION 

T HERE can be no doubt as to the greatness 
of the claims that we have just made. 
There is little wonder that to many minds 
they seem, when once they are really under¬ 
stood, to be both fantastic and incredible. They 
offer a revolution in our ordinary ways of think¬ 
ing and ought, surely, to produce a revolution 
in our ordinary ways of living. “ What manner 
of persons ought ye to be in all holy living and 
godliness,” says the New Testament, if we really 
believe that these things are true. It is because 
of the gap between the lives of nominal Christians 
and their professed faith that many find their 
claims hardly worthy of serious consideration at 
all. 

To answer this we propose, in the present 
chapter, to consider the results of this teaching 
in certain individual lives, and then, in the follow¬ 
ing chapter to draw out its social consequences. 
When a man becomes convinced that God means 
what we have claimed we should expect a momen¬ 
tous change in his life. Is this so ? At once 
we are confronted by the fact of Conversion. 

7 1 


72 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

We may quote the familiar words of Romanes : 
“ St. Augustine after 30 years of age, and other 
Fathers, bear testimony to a sudden, enduring 
and extraordinary change in themselves, called 
Conversion. Now this experience has been 
repeated and testified to by countless millions 
of civilized men and women in all nations and in 
all degrees of culture.” * When we turn to the New 
Testament we find its writers heaping metaphor 
upon metaphor to describe this change. It is a 
new birth, a passage from death into life, from 
darkness to light, a translation to a new realm, a 
redemption from slavery, a new creation. Hence 
the appeal from the reality of this experience to 
its fruits in transformed lives has always been 
pressed as one of the strongest evidences of 
Christianity. 

Such an argument, however, needs careful 
testing and examination. It is true, on the one 
hand, that no one any longer affects to despise 
as mere fanaticism or hypocrisy the experiences 
of religious people. Our libraries overflow with 
books on the Psychology of Religion wherein 
these experiences are carefully collated and dis¬ 
cussed. The literature of Mysticism has become 
fashionable and conversion discovered to be a 
theme worthy of a poet. But it does not follow 
in the least that the explanation which Christians 
give of their own experience is admitted to be 
true. The tendency of the day is rather to rank 
religious conversion as a well-marked example 

* Thoughts on Religion, p. 162. 


THE FACT OF CONVERSION 73 

of a class of phenomena whose laws may be 
discovered and processes described. Professor 
J. B. Pratt’s book on T he Religious Consciousness 
is full of illustrations of this attitude. He shows 
us that, to begin with, the infant is not a moral 
person at all; he has to become one. The great 
task of youth consists in the formation of a true 
self which shall be the master and not the tool 
of the instincts and impulses. The establishment 
of fairly settled purposes is the first step in the 
achievement of moral personality. But purposes 
may and often do conflict with each other quite 
as much as with temporary gusts of passion and 
impulse. Hence the other great step in self¬ 
making is the victory of one group of harmonious 
purposes over all others, and the complete subor¬ 
dination of everything else in life to these best¬ 
loved ends.* So regarded, conversion may be 
called “ a purely human phenomenon, indepen¬ 
dent alike of supernatural interference and of 
theological prepossession.” 

In all this there is much that is both valuable 
and of deep interest. The last generation was so 
dominated by the great ruling idea of Evolution 
that it was in danger of forgetting some of the 
more ordinary facts of life. Fascinated by the 
thought of growth, and noting truly enough the 
slow and gradual formation of habit, it forgot the 
sudden and startling transformations of character 
to which universal history and literature bear 
witness. Now our eyes have been turned again 

* Freely quoted from chap, vii, op. cit. 


74 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

to notice the familiar fact that sudden passions, 
love or hatred in particular, may so possess a 
man as to change his whole life. It appears that 
such changes may arise either as the apparent 
result of a single emotion or desire, or as the 
sudden fruition of a long and hidden preparation. 
We see, then, that all unknown to their subject, 
hidden processes of life are moving on, leading him 
towards some moment of crisis. As life goes on 
systems of associated thoughts, ideas, emotions 
are formed. We may act habitually for a long 
time from one set of principles and one standard 
of values. Yet all the time another set of princi¬ 
ples may be forming within us. We may ignore 
and repress it for the time. Then a period comes 
when there is a struggle for ascendance between 
the old and the new. And then comes the critical 
moment when the new comes flooding in and 
overwhelms the old. William James speaks in 
his usual picturesque style of “ the shifting of 
men’s centres of personal energy within them and 
the lighting up of new crises of emotion.” This 
is “ partly due to explicitly conscious processes 
of thought and will, but due largely to the sub¬ 
conscious incubation and maturing of motives 
deposited by the experiences of life. When 
ripe, the results hatch out, or burst into flower.” * 
Psychology goes further and shows us, even 
when no lengthy process of preparation can be 
discerned, how a single act of choice may be 
persisted in with a tenacity that seems out of all 

* Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 230. 


THE FACT OF CONVERSION 75 

proportion to the strength of the original desire. 
In his discussion on “ Voluntary Decision,” Prof. 
Stout has some interesting explanations of such 
cases.* He shows how, when a motive has been 
once adopted it becomes part of a man’s self and 
all the combative instincts support it. It is 
further confirmed by the natural aversion to a 
state of irresolution and by the sense of the 
ineffectiveness of indecision. The strength of 
social relations and the expectations of his friends 
move the man to persist, and by each following 
action he becomes more and more committed 
to it. Hence it may be argued that if only a 
man can be induced to make a choice, moved 
upon and driven and persuaded until, at last, 
he commits himself, it is quite natural and 
likely that he should persevere. The emotion of 
an hour may be so wisely directed that the whole 
of a life may be affected, especially if the cause is 
intrinsically noble, so that further experience of 
it shows how much it merits entire devotion. 
Times may come when to persuade a man to do 
something, to take some definite step, seems the 
only way of dealing with him. 

There seems no doubt that from both these 
points of view we are dealing with realities. So 
soon as we attempt to call back to the paths of 
honour and goodness one who has strayed from 
them, we appeal to his past, believing that there 
are dormant tendencies within him which may 
be roused again to reinforce our efforts. When 

* Manual of Psychology, bk. 4, chap. x. 


76 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

Christ dealt with the demoniac He asked him : 
“ What is thy name ? ” He was seeking to revive 
the memories of the time when he had a name of his 
own and a recognized place among his fellows. 
If such memories can be renewed, with all their 
gracious and restraining influences, one step will 
have been taken towards recovery. As the 
memories begin to stir, to persuade such a man to 
perform some self-committing action may be the 
best way of making them effective. 

We may sum up this discussion by saying that 
Psychology reinforces the Christian contention 
that human nature is adapted for such great 
changes as we describe by the word “ conversion.” 
Further, it explains the success of some of the 
methods used in seeking to bring men to conversion. 
But it is plain that it drives us to face the deeper 
question whether we have the right to speak in 
Christian conversion of the direct, regenerating 
activity of the Spirit of God. 

Let us ask how Christianity describes the exper¬ 
ience of men who become converted. It says 
that the Spirit of God was with them from the 
first, moving them to dissatisfaction with them¬ 
selves, using their natural methods of thought and 
action as means of instruction and discipline, 
yet all the while leading them to see that by such 
means alone true union with God could not be 
achieved. When that lesson had been learned 
they were ready to take from God what He was 
waiting to bestow, His gracious gift of reconcilia¬ 
tion with Himself. But Christianity maintains 


THE FACT OF CONVERSION 77 

that this means a real change, a passing from the 
old to the new. Psychology says : “ The act of 
yielding ... is the giving over of one’s self to 
the new life, making it the centre of a new person¬ 
ality, and living from within, the truth of it 
which had before been lived objectively.” Chris¬ 
tianity says that it means being “ in Christ,” 
joined to Him in one spirit, having still very much 
to learn, but beginning to see evil and its cure as 
He sees it, and setting out with Him to overcome 
it and by so doing to establish the Kingdom of 
God. 

The differences are manifest, since, whilst 
Psychology has taught us much, we miss just this 
part of the experience in so-called conversions 
outside of Christianity. That in many such in¬ 
stances help has been found and old habits broken 
and a better life begun seems to be indisputable. 
Ought we, therefore, to accept a levelling down 
process and say that when we get behind all the 
apparatus of doctrines and creeds, the experiences 
are essentially the same—need, struggle, surren¬ 
der, life ? 

Before we accept such a solution we must 
inquire into its power to explain specifically 
Christian phenomena, both in their intensity and 
their diffusion. Till we have done this we are in 
danger of mistaking analogy for identity. 

We may begin with the conversion of St. Paul, 
an event which will always stand out as one 
of the most influential happenings of history. 
Here there was probably much preparation, both 


78 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

conscious and unconscious. There were the 
struggles after peace of conscience so graphically 
described in the Epistle to the Romans. There 
was the anger against the claims made on behalf 
of Jesus, all the more bitter because Paul felt 
that he could give no adequate refutation of 
them. There was the haunting suspicion that 
after all Stephen and the despised Nazarenes 
were right, and had found the secret of life. Is it 
enough to say that Paul’s conversion meant his 
surrender to influences already present in his 
consciousness, that he was really, although he did 
not know it, a Christian already when he got on 
his horse to ride to Damascus ? The force with 
which his new convictions possessed him may 
then be measured by the violence with which he 
had held them down before. Or, in any case, if 
we grant that he did truly learn one of the great 
spiritual secrets of life, can we accept his judg¬ 
ment that this came to him through the direct 
action upon him of Jesus Christ ? Possibly such 
an error was almost inevitable for such a man at 
such a time, but for us it is the husk and not the 
kernel of his faith. That seems to be a fair 
putting of the case against the traditional view of 
Paul’s conversion. 

Now, it may be granted at once that such an 
analysis of the state of Paul’s mind is both valu¬ 
able and true. Doubtless he was trying to ride 
away from his conscience as he spurred along the 
road. Yet in an appeal to experience it is strange 
to affirm that the one account of Paul’s experi- 


THE FACT OF CONVERSION 79 

ence which cannot possibly be admitted is his 
own. Here is an elemental event so great and 
wonderful that he is always struggling to find 
words big enough to express it, an event which 
led to one of the most heroic and world-influenc¬ 
ing lives ever lived, and yet the man who lived it 
was seriously and vitally misled as to the source 
of its inspiration. The difficulty of such scepti¬ 
cism is very great. 

Yet it may be said that Paul may have been 
in error in thinking it was really, as he says, the 
Lord who appeared to him, and yet may have 
devoted his life as he did. The difficulty of this 
is that when we face soberly the facts of Paul’s 
experience we note that year by year his sense of 
the reality of the presence of Christ with him be¬ 
came more clear. His conversion was not one 
bright event of the past, standing out from days 
of comparative gloom ; it was the beginning of a 
close and happy fellowship of which he had no 
more doubt than of his own existence, tested 
through every conceivable experience of hardship 
and distress. He was familiar with the contro¬ 
versy that raged around Jesus and His place in 
history. As a devout Jew he had all the horror 
of sharing the worship of the eternal God with 
any created being. Yet he exhausts his language 
and even lays under tribute forms of speech de¬ 
rived from other religious systems, in order to 
express the supremacy of his risen and glorious 
Lord. It is the tried conviction of a long life 
with which we have to reckon. 


80 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

We may go further and ponder the way in which 
Paul found in his faith the answer to the other prob¬ 
lems of life. We have spoken of his sense of the 
pervasiveness and terribleness of sin. It was not 
enough for him to find deliverance from his own 
personal struggles, and power to fulfil the de¬ 
mands of conscience. It is not likely that this 
alone would have made him into the missionary 
of the Empire. He became that when he dis¬ 
covered that God had dealt and was always 
dealing with sin as a whole. He found this in the 
Cross of Christ. It is true that he may have had 
little understanding of this in his early days as a 
Christian, though he himself tells us that part of 
the primitive faith was that “ Christ died for our 
sins.” But later reflection convinced him in¬ 
creasingly of the depth and truth of this teaching, 
and showed him that he had found not merely a 
personal helper, but the Saviour of the world. 
Hence he became more and more certain of the 
meaning of his conversion. It is worth while to 
dwell on this mental history. Our first hypo¬ 
thesis to explain some incident in our own lives 
may be conjectural and liable to amendment, cer¬ 
tainly it stands in need of verification. But 
when such a hypothesis is found to contain 
within itself the solution to difficulties which 
were, to begin with, not present to our conscious¬ 
ness at all, when we see that it takes its place in 
a harmonious system of thought and life of which 
it is the centre and the key, then our certainty is 
immeasurably increased. So it was with Paul. 


THE FACT OF CONVERSION 81 

His first hypothesis that it was really Jesus who 
appeared to him put an end to his earlier struggles 
and solved some of his personal problems. But 
when he reflected on it in later years he found that 
it contained, also, the solution to his gravest 
problems as to the relations between the God of 
holiness and sinful men. It gave him a world 
message and a world faith, and he knew that he 
was not mistaken. It is probably true to say 
that in the long run our judgment of Christ is 
bound up with our judgment of sin. Sin may be 
so terrible that none but God manifest in the flesh 
can deal with it. Or it may be something that 
may be overcome by calling up the reserves of 
human nature, and by submitting to the gracious 
spiritual influences that surround us. Paul 
believed that he was a sinner and that he had 
been saved. Those who think with him about 
the fact of sin believe that they can understand 
the reality of his conversion. 

It is well before we turn away from Paul’s story 
to note that his experience was original and not imi¬ 
tative. We are often warned, and rightly so, of the 
danger of trying to work upin ourselves experiences 
which we have seen or read of in others. There 
has been, especially in connection with the doc¬ 
trine of conversion, a sort of ritual to which some 
teachers have tried to make everybody conform. 
Men have been troubled, and sometimes misled, 
by being taught to expect types of experience for 
which they were not adapted. But the first 
followers of Christ had no models to imitate. 


82 


THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

They did, indeed, believe in the reality of divine 
intercourse with men, and they had the stories of 
Abraham and Moses and the prophets in their 
minds. But now they found that One with whom 
they had lived and talked was with them still, 
dwelling within their hearts, controlling their 
thoughts. It has often been shown that in this 
the Christian attitude differs from all others, 
from that of the Mohammedan to the prophet, from 
that of the Buddhist to his teacher. They know 
nothing of the daily fellowship which taught Paul 
to say: “ I live, and yet no longer I, but Christ 
liveth in me,” however certain they may be of 
God in other ways. This new type of experience, 
differing from that of the mystic in that the sense 
of personal identity becomes more real as the 
relationship with Christ becomes more intense, 
has its historical beginnings in the first Christian 
generation, and has no real parallel outside of 
Christianity. We can find no adequate cause for 
the arising of so strikingly original an experience 
as this, save in the unique personality of Jesus 
Christ Himself. Thus, then, the essence of 
Paul’s experience of conversion lay in the fact 
that it brought him into direct personal relation¬ 
ship with a real Person who dealt with his sins, 
reconciled him to God, and remained with Him as 
Lord and Master of his whole life. 

This is still the claim of Christianity, attested, 
as we began by saying, by a great host of witnesses. 
When it is suggested that what is really essential 
in these experiences is not the actual presence of 


THE FACT OF CONVERSION 83 

a Helper but the belief in one, one must protest 
against the violence done to the experiences of 
those who are being studied. They learned much 
about themselves in their struggles towards the 
light. Yet, instead of being comforted by the 
suggestion that what they were really doing was 
to mobilize the hidden powers of their nature, 
they would have been horrified by it. “ Auto¬ 
suggestion ” is a great and powerful word in 
some circles to-day. But the saints know no 
such “ autos” good enough to save them. The 
more they look into the depths of conscious¬ 
ness the more they find to distress them, and the 
more urgent is their sense of need of a real 
Deliverer. In history they find the story of 
One who meets all their need. In experience He 
comes to them. “ They looked unto Him and 
they were radiant, and their faces were not 
ashamed.” 

We repeat, then, that the central thing in 
Christian conversion is the changed personal 
relationship. Christianity reveals the age-long 
conflict of God against sin, culminating in the 
Cross, and continuing in the work of the living 
Christ through the Spirit. When we bid a 
man believe in Christ, we tell him to take, so far 
as he is able, the rightful attitude of trust and 
surrender towards the Saviour from sin. So 
soon as he does this he is met by a grace that 
receives him and plants within him the germ of 
a new life. There is a work of God both preced¬ 
ing and following this moment. But, henceforth, 


84 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

the man has something which he could not have 
before. However much he has still to learn, he is 
now, in the central thought and power of his life, 
at one with God. 


CHAPTER VIII 


THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF SALVATION 

S UCH a study as we have just engaged in 
leaves many altogether cold and sceptical. 
They do not believe that there is a Christian 
secret into which they have not penetrated. 
After all, they say, you have been talking about 
an emotional crisis of which we know nothing and 
into which we have no wish to enter. Ours is 
an age when many people, especially the young, 
are severely critical of emotionalism in religion. 
Some of them have memories of emotions that 
led nowhere and only left them more callous. 
They do not deny the rights of religion, but they 
ask for something that is definite and practical. 
It is of little use to speak to them of a changed 
relationship to God unless we can show also that 
it means a changed relationship to men. It is 
to this task that we must now turn. 

Now, when we ask what is the greatest need 
of our distracted age we find the answer in one 
word—“ Fellowship.” We find our lives ham¬ 
pered and confined just because there are so many 
barriers between us and our fellow-men. Bar¬ 
riers of class and of race, of education and con- 

85 


86 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

vention and prejudice, separate us from one 
another and result in strife and hatred and con¬ 
flicting interests. It is true that we are often 
only dimly conscious of this. For long stretches 
of time we may be tolerably content with our¬ 
selves and our position and feel strong enough to 
stand alone, without understanding how much 
we need the support and the friendship of others. 
As Joseph Conrad writes : “ Few men realize 
that their life, the very essence of their character, 
their capabilities and their audacities, are only 
the expression of their belief in the safety of their 
surroundings. The courage, the composure, the 
confidence ; the emotions and principles ; every 
great and every insignificant thought belongs 
not to the individual but to the crowd : to the 
crowd which believes blindly in the irresistible 
force of its institutions and of its morals, in the 
power of its police and of its opinion.” But he 
goes on to say that “ the contact with pure 
unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature 
and primitive man, brings sudden and profound 
trouble into the heart.”* The last sentence, 
though it describes the experience of Europeans 
left solitary in Africa, has a very real meaning to 
us to-day, who have become aware, through the 
horrors of war, of the wildness of primitive pas¬ 
sions still unsubdued in the hearts of men sup¬ 
posed to have been civilized for centuries. We 
have become doubtful about the future of civili¬ 
zation, familiarized with dark forebodings of the 

* Tales of Unrest, p. 128. 


SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF SALVATION 87 

collapse of most of what makes life worth living. 
It is because of such things that we begin to 
think, as never before, of the possibilities of a 
world-wide brotherhood. 

When we ask what are the conditions of such a 
brotherhood, the answer seems to be both obvious 
and impossible. For a universal brotherhood we 
should require universal brotherly love, and to be 
told to love everybody seems nonsensical. We 
hear words like that in Church, and there they 
have some sort of life, but to apply them outside 
is another matter. We are inclined to say that 
we are not sure that we want to do this and we 
are quite sure that we cannot. 

It is doubtless true that real love is fatal to 
selfishness. Many a man escapes from the prison 
of self by falling in love. So said John Brindle- 
combe in Westward Ho !—“ When I first began 
to love her, I bid good-bye to all dirty tricks ; 
for I had someone then for whom to keep myself 
clean.” So said Tennyson : 

Love took up the harp of life, and smote on all the 
chords with might, 

Smote the chord of self which trembling passed in 
music out of sight. 

When love comes the self is no longer in the lime¬ 
light, but content to wait in the shadow and give 
up its own claims. But can we give any meaning 
to the love of humanity ? We can see move¬ 
ments in that direction. The Stoics saw in every 
man a part of nature, and, thinking of him as 


88 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

having his place in the universal harmony, learned 
to regard him with toleration. So says Marcus 
Aurelius : “ It is the privilege of human nature to 
love those that disoblige us. To practise this, 
you must consider that the offending party is of 
kin to you, that ignorance is the cause of the 
misbehaviour, and the fault is involuntary, that 
you will both of you quickly be in your graves; 
but especially consider that you have received 
no harm by the injury, for your mind is never the 
worse for it.”* Similarly, Kant taught that we 
were to treat every human being always as an 
end, never as a means, reflecting that we are all 
sharers in the common life of reason. Yet 
Marcus’s idea of love is a kindly toleration, not 
untouched by contempt. Such precepts, instead 
of stirring to action, rather leave us with a sense 
of oppression or constraint. They suggest more 
the uncomplaining acceptance of fate than the 
striving for a better world. There is no driving 
power in them. They are the diet of superior 
persons who feel themselves magnified by the 
moral littleness of others. They may nourish 
self-complacency, they will never feed the hungry. 
We find little help along this road. 

Has Christianity anything new to say here ? 
To begin with, it declares that “ God is Love.” 
It is well to reflect how new a thought this is. 
“ Friendship or love,” says Aristotle, “ we speak 
of where there is return of love ; but love of 
God admits neither return of love nor, indeed, 

* Meditations, vii, 22. 


SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF SALVATION 89 

love at all. For it would be an odd sort of thing 
if a man were to say he loved Zeus. 55 * It is 
a long way from this, or, say, from Spinoza’s 
“ intellectual love of God,” to the love of God 
revealed to us in Jesus calling forth in return a 
passion of adoration. If we deal in earnest with 
this thought it will lead us very far. But, we 
may say, how does this lead to love for all man¬ 
kind ? Are we not beginning at the wrong end ? 
Should not love to man come first ? Does not 
John say that a man who does not love the 
brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom 
he has not seen ? The answer is not very hard. 
John teaches that all love is of God. To him 
every unselfish act of love is a mark of the pre¬ 
sence of the Spirit of God. Yet it is only when a 
man has learned to recognize the source of this 
love that he is able to love all mankind. Then 
the love of God to him breaks down his pride, 
subdues his selfishness, brings him out of prison, 
and teaches him to say, “We love because He 
first loved us.” 

We may put this truth otherwise by saying 
that we can only love mankind when we see all 
men in God. It was the thought of the unity of 
the race that inspired the Stoics, but it could not 
bring them to the goal, because to them God was 
little more than an impersonal principle. It is 
when we see our Lord Himself looking out upon 
us from the eyes of the sinful and degraded, the 

* I owe this quotation to Mr. T. R. Glover, Progress in Religion, 
p. 137 - 


90 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

alien and the outcast, even the contemptuous and 
the proud, and remember that they are dear to 
Him, and that underneath all their evil He is 
striving to express Himself, that we begin to love 
them. We find the truth in one great saying of 
Thomas & Kempis : “ Love all for Jesus’ sake, 
but Jesus for Himself.” Those who learn to love 
Jesus know that this is no merely mystical dream 
but a plain truth of life. They cannot love Him 
without loving His brothers, but as they begin to 
love Him their love goes out to all whom He 
loves. Let us quote George Macdonald once 
more : “ Lies there not within the man and the 
woman a divine element of brotherhood, of 
sisterhood, a something lovely and lovable— 
slowly fading, it may be—dying away under the 
fierce heat of vile passions, or the yet more fearful 
cold of sepulchral selfishness—but there ? Shall 
that divine something, which, once awakened to 
be its own holy self in the man, will loathe these 
unlovely things tenfold more than we loathe 
them now—shall this divine thing have no recog¬ 
nition from us ? . . . Shall we leave our brother 
to his desolate fate ? Shall we not rather say, 

‘ With my love, at least, shalt thou be compassed 
about, for thou hast not thine own lovingness to 
infold thee ; love shall come as near to thee as it 
may ; and when thine comes forth to meet mine, 
we shall be one in the indwelling God ’ ? ” 

It is plain that this spirit would revolutionize 
modern society. It would transform all our 
commercial relationships. We go back to listen 


SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF SALVATION 91 

tc John Ruskin. Mr. J. A. Hobson tells us that 
Ruskin exposed the three deepest and most 
destructive maladies of modern industrial society. 
These are: “ First, the prevalent mechanization of 
work and life ; secondly, injustice as an economic 
basis of all bargaining ; thirdly, the definite forms 
of waste and injury to work and human character 
arising from trade competition.” * None of 
these things is possible where love is. We may 
not be able to visualize the form of a perfect 
Christian society, but we know, at least, that 
there could be no victimization, no treating of a 
human being as a tool, no denial of joy and beauty 
to those who fulfil the humbler functions. Where 
business is regarded, as Ruskin was always 
urging, as just as much a service to society as the 
work of the teacher or the physician, all these 
things would pass away. How such changes can 
come without the new spirit of love that comes 
from God is unthinkable. 

Similarly we may say that such a spirit would 
transform international relationships. Many of 
the nations of the world are at this time stricken 
with a cold and paralysing fear of one another. 
They dare not relax for one moment the hold 
which they have, or make the smallest concession, 
lest worse things should come upon them. The 
months pass by and bring calamity nearer. Here 
the problem is immeasurably harder. We have 
to reckon with racial differences, so subtle and so 
real. As Joseph Conrad says, speaking of the 

* Cf. Keenie, Christian Responsibility for the Social Order „ p# **3. 


92 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

bearing of the sailors on a ship on fire, “ There 
was a completeness in it, something solid like a 
principle, and masterful like an instinct—a dis¬ 
closure of something secret—of that hidden 
something, that gift of good or evil that makes 
racial difference, that shapes the fate of nations.” 
Doubtless this hidden something is always to be 
reckoned with. It is this that makes all true 
rapprochement so hard. It is clear that we 
must find some ground of agreement that goes 
deeper down than this secret can reach. But 
there is nothing deeper unless we can find it in 
God. This means that it is only on the spiritual 
plane that diverse races can become one. A real 
League of Nations can only be established in a 
common faith. So it has been said that “ brother¬ 
hood finds absolute and enduring reality only in a 
spiritual parentage—in a word, in the Fatherhood 
of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. 
That common sonship found in sharing the son- 
ship of Jesus Christ does, in fact—and not in 
rhetoric—form the one permanent foundation of 
world fellowship.”* 

Yet, it may still be said, in spite of this denial, 
that we are talking rhetoric and not facts. What 
are the facts ? We are bidden to look at the 
Churches and consider how even those who claim 
to have received the new life are still separated 
from one another, using sometimes bitter words 
in controversy, often unwilling to worship be- 

• Cf. Mathevs and Bisseker, Fellowship in Thought and 
Prayer, p. 2 6. 



SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF SALVATION 93 

eath the same roof or share in the Lord’s Supper. 
We are told that the Churches as a whole have 
been indifferent to the social well-being of the 
people, content to preach about heaven, while 
the conditions of life prevailing amongst many 
men and women have been fatal to goodness, 
and destructive in themselves of all high ideals. 
We are told that prominent members of Christian 
communities are fully as hard and grasping in 
their business life as those who are altogether 
outside. And as to international relationships 
we are reminded how the Church, or part of it, 
in every land, preached war and appealed to God 
to support the cause of its own nation. Hence 
there are many who believe that Christianity has 
proved too weak to meet the demands of actual 
life. Such people turn aside regretfully to seek 
ways of serving their generation outside. 

We cannot deny the partial truth of many of 
these charges. Yet there are many things that may 
be said in reply. As to the first, it is manifest 
that many Christians have never learned the 
meaning of our Lord’s parable of the Wheat and 
the Tares. In seeking to root up what they judge 
to be tares growing in the fields of others they 
have gone far to ruin the harvest. Yet here we 
dare to believe that a new spirit of toleration and 
sympathy is moving upon all communities of 
Christians. The dream of a united Christendom 
has dawned upon us. Woe to us if we despise it! 

As to the second, it is ungenerous to forget how 
often the Christian motive has been and is still 


94 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

the inspiration and the driving power of the 
greatest movements for the uplifting of the people. 
We may sorrowfully admit that there is in the 
world to-day, as there has always been, much 
fearless love of truth and lofty devotion to the 
cause of human betterment for which the Church 
has failed to find room. We may admit that 
often ^Christian men have spoken as though the 
Kingdom of God was only to be sought in heaven 
and not to be manifested on earth. Yet we may 
hold that these failures are due to the limitations 
of human vision, and that the faith which holds 
the key to the regeneration of character, once 
emancipated from its prejudices, possesses the 
only power that can remake society. 

As to the third, we can plead the greatest work 
of the Christian Church to-day, the Foreign Mis¬ 
sionary enterprise. Begun long since in sheer 
pity for the souls of those who did not know 
Christ, it has broadened out into a world-wide 
policy for the Kingdom of God on earth. The 
old and ignorant argument that the religion of 
every man is good enough for him is simply swept 
away before the force of the thought that the task 
is laid upon us of bringing together all the nations 
of the world into the only possible unity, “ the 
unity of the faith and knowledge of the Son of 
God.” Only then, as the thought of the peoples 
is Christianized, and the love of Christ constrains 
them, will war become impossible. 

Has Christianity ever, as a fact, achieved any¬ 
thing like this ? Let us go back for a closing 


SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF SALVATION 95 

illustration to the first century of our era. At 
that time there were made two efforts to form a 
universal fellowship. The first was made by 
Rome. Many peoples had been gathered into 
one under the rule of the Emperor. With the 
advent of Augustus and the end of the civil wars 
that had followed the death of Julius Caesar, men 
felt a sense of security and prosperity that had 
been unknown for ages. They looked to the 
strong central government of Rome to keep in 
control the turbulent elements and to give them 
the chance of living their own lives. Yet it was 
felt that something was needed to bind them still 
more closely together, and that this could be 
nothing else but a religion. Hence arose that 
strange striving after a common faith in the wor¬ 
ship of the Emperors. Men were permitted to 
hold what private religious opinions they desired 
so long as they consented to do homage before 
the image of the Emperor. In the Revelation of 
John we hear many echoes of the fierce persecu¬ 
tion that arose when the Christians refused to 
submit to this demand. As we ponder this story 
we see that the Roman government had grasped 
the truth which we have been expressing, that 
religion is the only permanent bond between men. 
They failed, as they were bound to fail, because 
no one can invent a religion. The tests of time 
destroy every faith that is not grounded in 
reality. Meanwhile, the Christians, with quite 
astonishing success, began to produce the very 
results after which the statesmen sought in vain. 


96 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

Gathering converts from the most diverse races, 
they grew into a community where, as Paul de¬ 
clared, “ there cannot be Greek and Jew, bar¬ 
barian, Scythian, bondman, freeman : but Christ 
is all and in all.” It needs a strong effort of 
thought for us to make clear to ourselves what it 
meant for a strict Jew to sit at meat with a 
Gentile, or for a master to kneel side by side with 
a slave. We begin to understand when we find 
Paul affirming that this was a divine mystery, 
hidden from all the earlier generations of man¬ 
kind, and now for the first time made manifest. 
To him it was a crowning proof of the divinity of 
Christianity that it could break down all dividing 
walls and join mankind into a new unity hitherto 
undreamed of. 

Is this power still latent in Christianity ? That 
is the ultimate question for us. There are great 
thoughts abroad in the world, in spite of all our 
distresses. 

Fiercely sweet as stormy springs, 

Mighty hopes are blowing wide, 

Passionate prefigurings 
Of a world revivified, 

Dawning thoughts that ere they set 
Shall possess the ages yet. 

Yet the greatest thought of all dawned long 
ago when, in such deep humility, the Son of God 
came to visit us. In Him, says Paul, “ are all 
the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden.” 
Those who are called by His name have only just 
become aware of the greatness of that wealth. 


SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF SALVATION 97 

If we are content to seek for it in the spirit of the 
one of whom our Lord spoke, who “ in his joy 
goeth and selleth all that he hath” to find it, 
we shall not fail. We turn back with confidence 
to the words of one of our greatest teachers: 
“ Much may remain dark to us ; but the purposes 
of life receive a clear and powerful direction the 
moment we believe that the one supreme way of 
life is that Jesus Christ, God’s Son, our Lord, 
who has been made known to us from the first in 
the Creed. No other single way, capable of 
uniting the whole nature and life of man, has yet 
been discovered or devised which does not tend to 
draw us down rather than lift us up. But if in 
Him is shown at once the way of God, so far as 
it can be intelligible to man, and the way of man 
according to God’s purpose, then many a plaus¬ 
ible and applauded way stands condemned at once 
as of necessity leading no whither ; and many a 
way which promises little except to conscience 
is glorified with Him, and has the assurance of 
His victory.”* 


• Hort, The Way, The Truth, The Life, p. 38. 




CHAPTER IX 


RELIGION AND LIFE .’ II 

1 ET us now turn back over the ground which 
iWe have covered and ask how far our ex¬ 
position of Christianity has met the needs 
from which we started. 

We began with the thought of man as depen¬ 
dent. We saw him, in his profound sense of 
loneliness and helplessness, reaching out to find 
some great Companion in whom his life was 
grounded and to whom he could trust himself. 
Christianity meets this need by its message of the 
God in whom we live and move and have our 
being. Yet it presents Him as intensely per¬ 
sonal, possessing in perfection every virtue which 
is dimly shadowed forth in human nature, and as 
having Himself come forth to seek and to mani¬ 
fest Himself to men in the Person of His Son. 
Those who can accept this message live in per¬ 
fect peace with their minds stayed on Him. 

We went on to speak of man’s need of self- 
expression and of his natural rebellion against any 
view that made of him a mere puppet in the 
hands of a higher power. We claim that this is 

99 



100 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

met by the thought of God as the supreme Artist 
and the supreme Thinker. There have been pre¬ 
sentations of Christianity which have ignored 
this. When human life was presented as a drama 
in which God and Satan were contending for the 
human soul, and the issue was in doubt until 
man’s last breath had been drawn, the interest 
was intense, but there was little room left for 
either thought or art. Yet this type of other¬ 
worldliness is far removed from the teaching of 
Jesus, or of the greatest pf His followers. In his 
beautiful essay on Shelley, Francis Thompson 
appeals to Christian teachers to remember the 
claims of art. He says : “ With many the reli¬ 
gion of beauty must always be a passion and a 
power, it is only evil when divorced from the 
worship of the Primal Beauty. Poetry is the 
preacher to men of the earthly as you of the 
Heavenly Fairness; of that earthly fairness 
which God has fashioned to His own image and 
likeness. You proclaim the day which the Lord 
has made, and she exults and rejoices in it. You 
praise the Creator for His works, and she shows you 
that they are very good. Beware how you mis¬ 
prize this potent ally, for hers is the art of Giotto 
and Dante.” Those who have grown up to 
picture Christianity as a narrow and cramping 
force, hostile to all natural gaiety and cheerful¬ 
ness, must learn that the knowledge of God in 
Jesus Christ does not cramp life but fills it with 
new meaning. He who made man desires to see 
him express himself to the full, only keeping his 


RELIGION AND LIFE: II ioi 

gaze fixed on the goal where all divergent lines 
of truth and beauty meet. 

We may say the same about the life of thought. 
There was once a pitiful quarrel between know¬ 
ledge and faith. There were days when all that 
was asked of knowledge was to justify and arrange 
in order certain truths already given in revelation. 
Those were the times when the pioneers of know¬ 
ledge could be haled before ecclesiastical tribun¬ 
als and called to account for their daring. As 
knowledge threw off these shackles and asserted 
its independent right, it is not strange that some 
seekers after truth found nothing but supersti¬ 
tion and ignorance in the representatives of the 
Church. But those days are behind us now. 
Christians believe, as firmly as ever, that God 
has revealed Himself in nature and in history. 
But His revelation has come not in dogmas that 
stifle thought, but in facts that evoke it. It is 
not by refusing knowledge, but by thinking it 
through to the very end that faith must find its 
certainty. 

So with the claims of the moral self. We have 
spoken of God as of One in whom there is no dark¬ 
ness at all, no envy or malice or waywardness, but 
pure beneficent goodness, so good that He cannot 
be content till all men are good too. Hence we 
see Him inexorable in His demand for goodness, 
shrinking from no sacrifice of Himself, bearing all 
the consequences of human sin. Here we find 
the help that we crave for when we are desperate 
with the sense of moral defeat. We take the 


102 


THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

promise of victory from One who will share our 
lives, fight our battles with us, and make the 
springs of life pure and wholesome. This ideal 
does not bind us to a narrow set of conventional 
rules ; it saves us from meanness by the greatness 
of the task it sets before us, and delivers us from 
evil by joining our limited lives to a life of perfect 
goodness. 

Moreover we have found a faith that calls our 
social self into a universal fellowship. We have 
no use for the thought of a narrow group of saints 
with the mass of sinners left outside in the cold. 
It is true that those who have found the inner 
secret of fellowship may be few, but the discoverers 
are bound to give themselves ever more freely to 
others. If they try to hoard their treasure they 
lose it. But their power of giving themselves and 
of understanding others comes from that close 
contact with that inner world of peace and glad¬ 
ness into which they have been led through their 
Lord. Through the Son of Man they learn to 
become brothers of men. 

Hence we may claim that this ideal of Christian¬ 
ity is wide and deep enough to meet all the needs 
of our manifold human nature. 

Yet, after all, we are still open to the charge 
that we have fallen into the common fallacy of 
making a God to satisfy our own desires. We 
are told that man is always creating ideals for 
himself, so as to escape from the tyranny of the 
primitive instincts. So Mr. Tansley writes : 
“ The ideal may be projected upon God, repre- 


RELIGION AND LIFE: II 103 

sented as the Will of God, and when it is thus 
definitely externalized an added feeling of its 
security is often felt—the treasure is safe in a 
supernatural sanctuary. The mind, like an 
Indian juggler, can climb up a rope, the end of 
which it has thrown into the heavens. But the 
mind may recognize the ideal as its own creation, 
into the likeness of which it tries to fashion reality, 
whether it is concerned with an ideal of conduct 
or personality, with a social ideal, or with some¬ 
thing of more limited scope and more easily 
attained.”* 

The illustration is a bad one, since the juggler 
does not really climb up his rope, but only 
manages to suggest to the lookers-on that he is 
doing so. Whereas, as Mr. Tansley admits, these 
ideals of ours, whatever their origin, are the cause 
of all the real progress of humanity. It is a 
surprising conclusion that fictions which hang 
unsupported in mid-air should produce results 
of such value. 

It may be urged again that we can find many 
examples of similar happenings. Thus the earlier 
chemists set out to find the philosopher’s stone. 
It was never there, and yet in the search they 
found many of the secrets of nature. So the 
early navigators set out to find the North-West 
Passage. There was no passage to find, but they 
discovered a new world. So the earlier hypothe¬ 
sis of God may be said to have been useful in its 
day, but left behind for us. The difference is 

* Tansley, The New Psychology , pp. 139-140. 


io 4 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

that no other hypothesis has been found to take 
the place of God, and that whilst our spiritual 
needs are as clamant as ever there is no way of 
meeting them unless we can find God. 

Moreover, there is much more to be said, even 
from the logical point of view, for faith in God. 
We have seen men setting out from very different 
needs, dependent, moral, intellectual, social, 
to find some basis for life. Hence they have 
spoken of God in varying terms. But the God 
that satisfies the conscience has been found to 
satisfy also the mind and the heart. The God 
revealed in Jesus Christ has been found to satisfy 
human nature as a whole. Here we come back 
to the argument used in our discussion of the 
conversion of Paul. There we saw that a hypo¬ 
thesis framed to explain one set of phenomena 
was found to explain many other facts which 
were not at first present to consciousness at all. 
That is the surest mode of verification known to 
science. So we claim here that the view of God 
which unifies life, explains human history, and 
gives hope for the future, is confirmed by a mass 
of evidence that becomes more and more im¬ 
pressive the longer it is considered. 

Yet, finally, it may be urged that the reason 
why our view of God appears to meet all these 
needs is simply that it is a composite one. It is 
a very different view from those which thought 
of God as the great Avenger, or the supremely 
righteous Judge, or the almighty King. Yet all 
these views have been presented in the past, and 


RELIGION AND LIFE: II 


i°5 


satisfied for the time those who accepted them. 
We may be told that we first construct a view of 
God that satisfies all our desires and then claim as 
evidence the fact that it does so. The answer to 
this should be plain to those who have followed 
our argument. Our claim is that our thought of 
God does not come from philosophizing or from 
speculation, but that it derives directly from 
Jesus Christ. We meet with Him on the plane 
of history and He offers to us the thought of God 
which we have expounded. If we cannot find 
it in Him we have no right to assert it. If, as 
we have urged, it is present, both implicitly and 
explicitly, in His teaching, then we are face to 
face with the fact that a view of God presented 
in Palestine many centuries ago is adequate for 
all our modern needs. Further still, we are 
brought up against Jesus Himself. We have 
urged that His life and character and claims and 
inner consciousness compel us to give to Him the 
Name that is above every name, and to recognize 
in Him God manifest in the flesh. Admitting 
this, we have in our hands the key that unlocks 
the meaning of history, the hope for the future, 
and a faith that remains undisturbed amidst the 
perplexities and contradictions of life. Faith in 
Christ is not easy. It never was. In its deeper 
sense it only comes, when childhood’s days are 
past, from the strenuous confronting of all the 
problems of life and thought and conduct with 
Christ Himself. Yet as we look at Him many of 
us leara to say with growing certainty : 



106 THE CERTAINTY OF GOD 

That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, 
Or decomposes but to recompose, 

Become my universe that feels and knows. 

Or when, quoting Browning again, we are 

Putting the question ever, “ Does God love, 

And will ye hold that truth against the world ? ” 

we can only answer with him : 

I say, the acknowledgment of God in Christ 
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee 
All questions in the earth and out of it. 




























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